My new piece on South Jerusalem’s unofficial, non-establishment, do-it-yourself holy place is now up at the Hadassah Magazine site:
On the far side of the circle from me, women sang, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem,” in a soft, melancholy melody. There were a couple of hundred silhouettes in the circle—the women mostly sitting on one side, near the dark shapes of the olive and pomegranate trees on the downhill slope beyond the lawn, the men mostly sitting on the other side, near the rough stone retaining wall of the promenade above us.
The song ended; a young male voice began chanting the Book of Lamentations, “Alas, lonely sits the city once great with people….”
It was actually rather difficult to forget Jerusalem: I needed only to stand to look beyond the trees and across the valley below them to see the Old City walls and, within them, the gold Dome of the Rock illuminated by floodlights. That jewel-like scene was set in the wider panorama of the lights of nighttime Jerusalem, from the hotel and office towers of West Jerusalem on the left to Abu Dis on the right.
At a slight delay, 100 feet away, a new voice began, “Alas, lonely sits the city…” as if joining in singing a round. Another group had reached the point in the Tisha Be’av evening service for reciting the biblical book about the destruction of ancient Jerusalem. In fact, a medley of prayer was in progress all along the landscaped promenade overlooking the Old City.
On the lawn were youth tour groups from abroad and a large circle of soldiers as well as gatherings of young Orthodox families with baby carriages. At the stone plaza at one end, several hundred people had joined the services conducted by Moreshet Avraham, a Conservative congregation from the adjacent East Talpiot neighborhood. All together, the crowd probably numbered in the low thousands. It gets larger each Tisha Be’av, regulars say.
The Armon Hanatziv Promenade—tayelet in Hebrew—is one of the architectural gems of contemporary Jerusalem. But it is not marked on tourist maps as a holy place. It is a park, popular among joggers, kite flyers, picnicking families—both Jewish and Palestinian. It is a standard stop for tour guides who want to describe Jerusalem’s history from one lookout point. And yet, in a quiet, spontaneous, grass-roots process, it has also become a place of worship—an alternative sacred space, nondenominational, informal, multicultural. It fulfills that function not just on Tisha Be’av, but also Shavuot, Hoshana Rabba (the seventh day of Sukkot) and other occasions. In a city of religious turf wars and jealous religious establishments, the tayelet is an undeclared shrine to unestablished religion. …
Read the rest here, and come back to South Jerusalem to comment.