Christians in the Holy Land are marking Good Friday this year amid signs the coronavirus crisis is winding down, with religious sites open to limited numbers of faithful but none of the mass pilgrimages usually seen in the week leading up to Easter.

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

The virus is still raging in the Philippines, France, Brazil, and other predominantly Christian countries, where worshippers are marking a second annual Holy Week under various movement restrictions amid outbreaks fanned by more contagious strains.

Last year, Jerusalem was under a strict lockdown, with sacred rites observed by small groups of priests, often behind closed doors. It was a stark departure from past years when tens of thousands of pilgrims would descend on the city's holy sites.

This year, Franciscan friars in brown robes led hundreds of worshippers down the Via Dolorosa, retracing what tradition holds were Jesus' final steps while reciting prayers through loudspeakers at the Stations of the Cross. Another group carried a wooden cross along the route through the Old City, singing hymns and pausing to offer prayers.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was crucified, died, and rose from the dead, is open to visitors in accordance with mask-wearing and social-distancing guidelines.

"Things are open, but cautiously and gradually," said Wadie Abunassar, an adviser to church leaders in the Holy Land. "In regular years we urge people to come out. Last year we told people to stay at home ... This year we are somehow silent."

Israel has launched one of the world's most successful vaccination campaigns, allowing it to reopen restaurants, hotels, and religious sites. However, air travel is still limited by quarantine and other restrictions, keeping away the foreign pilgrims who usually throng Jerusalem during Holy Week.

Israel included Palestinian residents of Jerusalem in its vaccination campaign but has provided a limited number of vaccines to those in the occupied West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority has imported tens of thousands of doses for a population of more than 2.5 million.

Israeli authorities said up to 5,000 Christians from the West Bank would be permitted to enter for Easter celebrations. Abunassar said he was not aware of any large tour groups from the West Bank planning to enter, as in years past, likely reflecting concerns about the virus.

Pope Francis began Good Friday with a visit to the Vatican's COVID-19 vaccination center, where volunteers have spent the past week administering some 1,200 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to poor and disadvantaged people in Rome.
The Vatican bought its own doses to vaccinate Holy See employees and their families and has been giving away surplus supplies to homeless people. A masked Francis posed for photos with some of the volunteers and recipients in the Vatican audience hall.

Later Friday, Francis was to preside over the Way of the Cross procession in a nearly empty St. Peter's Square, instead of the popular torchlit ritual he usually celebrates at the Colosseum.

In France, a nationwide 7 p.m. curfew is forcing parishes to move Good Friday ceremonies forward in the day, as the traditional Catholic night processions are being drastically scaled back or canceled. Nineteen departments in France are on localized lockdowns, where parishioners can attend daytime Mass if they sign the government's "travel certificate."

Although a third lockdown "light" is being imposed Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron has wavered on a travel ban for Easter weekend, allowing the French to drive between regions to meet up with family on Friday.

Fire-ravaged Notre Dame will not hold a Good Friday mass this year, but the cathedral's "Crown of Thorns" will be venerated by the cathedral's clergy at its new temporary liturgical hub in the nearby church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois.

In the Philippines, streets were eerily quiet, and religious gatherings were prohibited in the capital of Manila and four outlying provinces. The government placed the bustling region of more than 25 million people back under lockdown this week as it scrambled to contain an alarming surge in COVID-19 cases.

The Philippines had started to reopen in hopes of stemming a severe economic crisis, but infections surged last month, apparently because of more contagious strains, increased public mobility, and complacency.

Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!

The post Christians mark Good Friday in Jerusalem as pandemic winds down appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

David Pearlman, an 82-year-old retired accountant, began collecting English comic cards as a boy before turning his attention to postcards.

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

"When I began to see some different cards around the world, I could see that there was a big subject... so I gradually moved over to looking only for cards that featured Palestine," he told Agence France-Presse from his London home.

The collection's first picture postcard dates to 1892. In the years prior to the invention of the telephone, postcards were first and foremost a means of communication, before becoming a way to promote businesses or ideas.

"Most countries were allowing postcards to be sent through the post, half the price of a letter," Pearlman said.

"In the 1890s, as the hotel trade began to grow in Palestine, a number of organizations were beginning to produce cards that portrayed or featured their hotel or business establishment."

Pearlman's collection provides a window into the major events transpiring in the small patch of land under Ottoman, British and finally Israeli rule.

It includes cards from World War I British soldiers and postcards featuring drawings by early 20th century Israeli artists. Others were manufactured in Britain with Holy Land imagery, to be used by Christian or Jewish organizations seeking to promote their causes, he said.

Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!

The postcards − categorized in shoeboxes in Pearlman's garage and accumulating to the point where he had to park his car on the street − were given to the Hebrew University's Folklore Research Center in November.

Center director Dani Schrire said the collection could offer a glimpse into the psyche of the land and its people.

"We are in a very good position now to begin research from different disciplines and understanding the imagination of the Holy Land," he said.

There are no immediate plans to put the collection on public display.

Pearlman, who admitted to not having sent a postcard in many years, said that in the early 20th century, they "were like the mobile phone."

They also provide an imprint of a time and place.

"Someone called postcards time capsules," Pearlman said. "They capture a moment in time, and many of these moments have now passed, and therefore they have captured a little piece of history."

This article was first published by i24NEWS.

The post Hebrew University receives world's largest collection of Holy Land postcards appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

These Sudanese guards were so stealthy that in 1855, the Muslim Waqf put them in jail to ensure that the Belgian Duke of Brabant, a Christian, could visit the Mount safely. The Waqf went so far as to forbid photographers to document the historic visit, during which the "superior religion" (as Islam sees itself) honored someone who represented either Christianity or Judaism.

                                               Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

When the exhibit "The Mount," which is currently open at the Tower of David Museum, was being researched, museum director and curator Eilat Lieber and curator of the exhibit Shimon Lev left no stone unturned to find a photograph of that historic visit and were astonished that none could be found. Although that fit in well with the fact that the first photographs of the Temple Mount, from 1839, were taken from a distance, mostly from the Mount of Olives, by Christian photographers who controlled the newly-invented craft. The work – while lovely – suffers from its distance from the subject.

But only a few years later, the Mount was opened to Christian, Armenian, and even one photographer who had been born Jewish and later converted. Many documented the inner compound and events that took place there. The exhibit "The Mount" offers an exciting photographic glimpse at the modern-day biography of the Jerusalem volcano, its eruptions (which were almost always the result of events that started far away), and many peaceful moments of the last 180 years.

A Jewish visit from Cyprus

In 1898, when non-Muslims were no longer barred from the Temple Mount compound, German Emperor Wilhelm II visited. Photographers from the American Colony in Jerusalem took pictures. Three years later, in 1901, running water was put into Al-Aqsa Mosque. Lev and his research assistant Yael Brandt discovered a rare photograph of the ceremony marking that development in a book called "Al-Quds Album," which was published by a Turkish organization.

"That was the first place in the Old City to be connected to running water," Lev says.
The curators also managed to locate a picture of King Hussein of Jordan switching on the first electric lights at Al-Aqsa. However, it is not included in the exhibit because the rights to it were unclear.

The curators also encountered difficulties in working with the Waqf. After a few conversations, it became clear that the Muslim administrative authority was afraid to work with a public Israeli museum located in the Old City. Nevertheless, the exhibit is full of other photos.

Men and women, un-separated

Close-up photos of the beautiful architecture of the Temple Mount and the mosques are to be expected, but much more exciting are the photos that document the first years of the Israeli-Arab struggle over the Land of Israel. One, from April 1920, shows a marching band from Yorkshire taking part in the Nabi Moussa, which developed into anti-Jewish riots; another shows a British patrol plane flying over the Temple Mount during those same riots. A photo from the time of the Arab Revolt shows two British soldiers guarding one of the Temple Mount gates that had been barricaded with planks of wood and barbed wire while Grand Mufi Haj Amin al-Husseini was hiding inside. A photo taken right after the Jewish Quarter was occupied in the 1948 War of Independence shows King Abdullah I of Jordan visiting Al-Aqsa, accompanied by soldiers from the Jordanian Legion.

The Western Wall also appears in the exhibit. A photo from the time it was under Jordanian control shows it as it appeared then – one side of a narrow side alley.

Another rare photograph by an unknown photographer taken from the air illustrates the difference between the Western Wall today, with its expansive plaza, and the narrow passageway on the edges of a residential area, before Israel demolished those homes in 1967. The Turks allowed Jewish prayer in the passageway only after a major earthquake struck Jerusalem in the 16th century. The quake destroyed some of the homes that were built up against the Western Wall.

Another picture of the "wall passage" from 1880 shows Jewish men and women worshipping side by side.

'The most volatile'

The exhibit also does justice to Amos Zucker, an intelligence officer in the IDF's Southern Command and an amateur photographer. During the 1967 Six-Day War, he found himself with nothing to do, so he attached himself to the Central Command in Jerusalem. According to Lev, Zucker – who is unknown – rather than his more famous colleagues like David Rubinger or Micha Baram, was actually the first to photograph Israeli forces entering the Temple Mount.

The photos of paratroopers walking up the steps to the Dome of the Rock, or of paratroopers raising the Israeli flag on the iron fence on top of the Western Wall, were taken by Zucker. Dozens of his other pictures provide more fodder for historians. These pictures, Lev believes, settle the dispute about "who got there first" – it was the paratroopers, not the Jerusalem Brigade.

Lev and Lieber decided to keep the most difficult images of the ethnonational-religious conflict over the Mount, the ones that show blood and bodies, out of the exhibit. They did include images of violent demonstrations, as well as images that show that the charged location once knew calmer days, such as a photo of Israeli model Aviva Banai taken with the Dome of the Rock in the background as part of a series for the Gottex swimsuit company.

"We aren't here to school anybody," says Lieber.

"We are bringing the modern photographic history of the Mount to the public. This is another aspect of research of [the Mount], but we are careful not to interpret it. We also organize tours of the Temple Mount – thousands have already taken part – with the best guides there are."

Lev, a veteran artist who has curated dozens of exhibits, says that "The Mount" marks the apex of his curatorial career.

"It's the most loaded, sensitive, volatile subject in the Middle East, so it was also the most challenging and meaningful exhibit I've curated so far," he says.

The post A photographic history of Temple Mount appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

The Israel Antiquities Authority estimates that the mosque, uncovered ahead of new construction in the Bedouin town of Rahat in the Negev Desert, dates back to the seventh to eighth centuries.

Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter

There are large mosques known to be from that period in Jerusalem and in Mecca but it is rare to find a house of prayer so ancient whose congregation is likely to have been local farmers, the antiquities authority said.

Excavated at the site were the remains of an open-air mosque – a rectangular building, about the size of a single-car garage, with a prayer niche facing south towards Mecca.

"This is one of the earliest mosques known from the beginning of the arrival of Islam in Israel, after the Arab conquest of 636 CE," said Gideon Avni of the antiquities authority.

"The discovery of the village and the mosque in its vicinity are a significant contribution to the study of the history of the country during this turbulent period."

The post Archaeologists find mosque dating back to Islam's arrival in Holy Land appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.