Shabbat in Jerusalem

Our last day in Jerusalem was on the sabbath.  Technically, the sabbath starts at sundown on Friday.  When we returned from the day at Masada and the Dead Sea, we said our goodbyes to our new touring friends.  Kirsten and I went down to Ben Yuddah Street, which looked like a deserted ghost town.  We were about to give up all hope of finding a place to eat and were going to go to Mc Donald's, when we came upon a little Italian restaurant that was open.  While their food obeys all Jewish dietary laws, they are open on Shabbat, so they have no Kosher certificate.  We enjoyed some nice Israeli wine and our waitress was a cool chic from upstate New York named Nadine.  She waitresses on the side and has her own Art and Jewelry company (you can check out her website at http://www.nadinessra.com).


On Saturday, we were on our own as far as sightseeing, so we decided to see the Garden Tomb.  The Garden Tomb is considered the Protestant version of where Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried.  The concept or belief in an alternative site to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, came about in the late 19th century by a British man named Charles Gordon.  The location of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre raised too many doubts in Gordon's mind, so he set out to find what he felt was the true spot.  We had a hard time finding it and ended up getting lost in an Orthodox neighborhood where we received unwelcome glances from the residents.

In 1883, near to the Damascus Gate, General Gordon found a rocky facade which from several angles resembled the face of a skull; since one of the possible translations for Golgotha is the Aramaic word for skull, and may refer to the shape of the place, Gordon concluded that the rocky facade was likely to have been Golgotha.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has its tomb just a few yards away from its Golgotha, corresponding with the account of John the Evangelist: "Now in the place where he was crucified there was a ... new tomb" (John 19:41). In 1869 a number of tombs had also been found near Gordon's Golgotha, and Gordon concluded that one of them must have been the tomb of Jesus. John also specifies that Jesus' tomb was located in a garden; consequently, an ancient wine press and cistern have been cited as evidence that the area had once been a garden, and the somewhat isolated tomb adjacent to the cistern has become identified as the Garden Tomb of Jesus. This particular tomb also has a stone groove running along the ground outside it, which Gordon argued to be a slot that once housed a stone, corresponding to the biblical account of a stone being rolled over the tomb entrance to close it.

Critics claim that the cistern found at the site was not developed until the time of the Crusades and that the style of the tomb was actually used much earlier (7th-8th centuries B.C.) and would not have been used during the time of Jesus.

Catholic and Orthodox denominations do not hold any reverence to this site, but it is very important for Protestants from around the world.  Our British guide explained that churches come from all over the world and hold services at the tomb.

After our visit to the Garden Tomb we decided to go back to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and see the actual tomb since we did not have time on our group tour a few days before.  We didn't have to wait very long.  The "bouncer" was a Greek Orthodox priest who wore Fila sneakers and had a blue tooth in his ear.

For dinner that night we visited the Jerusalem YMCA.  The local "Y" is housed in a beautiful building adjacent to The King David Hotel.  It also has a great restaurant called Three Arches, which has got to be the only YMCA Restaurant in the world that serves booze, which makes dinner much better!