Free Republic

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority on Monday said it was backing down from a contentious plan to encompass Christian holy sites on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives in a national park following vociferous outcry from major churches. The Mount of Olives in east Jerusalem rises above Jerusalem’s Old City and its sites are holy to three monotheistic faiths. Its slopes to the east of the Old City are studded with churches of various sects that mark the traditional places of events in the life of Jesus. The Armenian, Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches petitioned Israel’s environmental protection minister,...

Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=35&v=dSQz3Y57RBw An Israeli singer and his family were attacked by an Arab lynch mob in eastern Jerusalem Saturday night, following a concert at a hotel near the Mount of Olives. ..... On their way back home, Miller told Kikar Hashabbat, he and his family drove towards Mount Scopus via the mixed neighborhood of A-Tur in eastern Jerusalem. While driving through A-Tur, Miller suddenly found the road blocked by a mob of Arabs, who he says were carrying clubs and hurling stones at Jewish cars. “As I was driving through A-Tur towards Mount Scopus, all of the sudden I saw...

JERUSALEM -- Samuel Willenberg, the last survivor of Treblinka, the Nazi death camp where 875,000 people were systematically murdered, has died in Israel at the age of 93. Only 67 people are known to have survived the camp, fleeing in a revolt shortly before it was destroyed. Treblinka holds a notorious place in history as perhaps the most vivid example of the "Final Solution," the Nazi plan to exterminate Europe's Jews. Unlike at other camps, where some Jews were assigned to forced labour before being killed, nearly all Jews brought to Treblinka were immediately gassed to death. Only a select...

Dorin Cioba the leader of three million Roma around the world, landed in Israel on Wednesday. Roma are widely known as Gypsies. On his first visit to Israel, Cioba, who is president of the International Romani Union, plans to visit the Roma community in Jerusalem as well as the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. The photographer Roni Ben-Ari invited Cioaba to Israel for the opening of her exhibit that documents the life of Gypsies in the city of Lugoj, Romania. The exhibit opens on Thursday at the Museum of Israeli Art in Ramat Gan. "This is the first time that I...

Since 2009, archaeologists have been slowly excavating the ancient town of Magdala—thought to be the home of Mary Magdalene—near the Sea of Galilee. Among their finds has been a first-century synagogue where, experts say, Jesus likely preached. Image: Israel Antiquities Authority Although Jerusalem and Bethlehem are the sites most commonly associated with Jesus, Father Eamon Kelly—vice president of Israel's Magdala Center and vice chargé of the Pontifical Institute Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center—points out that Jesus spent almost his entire life in what is now northern Israel. "Eighty percent of Jesus' public life was here," he tells the Israeli...

Jerusalem City Council Member, Arieh King, visited the Mount of Olives Saturday night, and returned from the trip shaken. “The Israeli government has decided to abandon the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives and in recent weeks, terrorists have taken control of large parts of the mountain,” King wrote of the ancient site on his Facebook page. Several weeks ago, the gravestone of the Hassidic leader, the Grand Rebbe of Modzitz, Rabbi Yisrael Dan Taub was destroyed, along with the gravestones of dozens of others, including several well-known rabbis. Vandalism at the Mount of Olives cemetery is a rampant...

JERUSALEM — A Jewish group in Jerusalem is using 21st-century technology to map every tombstone in the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives, a sprawling, politically sensitive necropolis of 150,000 graves stretching back three millennia. The goal is to photograph every grave, map it digitally, record every name, and make the information available online. That is supposed to allow visitors to find their way in the cemetery, long a bewildering jumble of crumbling gravestones and rubble surrounded by Arab neighborhoods in east Jerusalem. Beset for many years by neglect, it is among the oldest cemeteries in continuous use in...

The Great Rift Valley extends some 4,000 miles southward from Syria north of Israel, through the Gulf of Aqaba, through Ethiopia, and all the way to Mozambique in southeast Africa. It harbors a giant fault, which has been under investigation as a model for sea floor spreading. A recent geologic event rent a gaping crack through the desert of Ethiopia, causing safety concerns for locals. These crustal plate motions may foreshadow rifting events further north in the Great Rift Valley...