Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Eureka! Pictures Beneath the Temple Mount Now Online The Israel Antiquities Authority Pictures Taken after the 1927 Earthquake - picture a day


  1. Library of Congress caption from the American Colony
    Collection: "The Temple area. The Double Gate. 
    Ancient entrance to Temple beneath al Aqsa." Note the
    staircase that apparently led to the surface and the 
    Temple plaza
    In October 2012, we published here "What Is behind the Mysterious Sealed Gates of Jerusalem's Old City?"  

    The essay showed two incredible 85-year old photographs of columns and chambers under the Temple Mount from the archives of the Library of Congress/American Colony collection of photographs. The captions under the pictures read "The Temple area, the Double Gate. Ancient entrance to Temple beneath al Aqsa." The pictures were taken between 1920 and 1933, according to the caption.

    We theorized in October that the American Colony photographer gained access to the area under the al Aqsa Mosque, partially destroyed in the 1927 earthquake. 

    Nadav Shragai, a scholar on Jerusalem sites, reported in aYisrael HaYom article last year, that Robert Hamilton, director of the British Mandate Antiquities Authority, had explored under the mosque at the time. He "photographed, sketched, excavated and analyzed" what he saw. But he promised the Islamic Authorities, the Waqf, that he would make "no mention of any findings that the Muslims would have found inconvenient" such as findings from the time of the Jewish Temples. 

    IAA Hamilton collection. Inside the
    "Double Gate Pendenture"

    
    From the IAA Hamilton collection. Inside the "Double Gate" of
    the southern wall of the Temple Mount. It is clearly the same arch
    in the picture taken by the American Colony photographer.




















    After 1948 the British Mandate Antiquities Authority became the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), and after the 1967 war the old archives in the Rockefeller Museum also came under Israeli control.

    Flight of stairs (on the right side) leading into a rock-cut passage
    This week, the IAA posted hundreds of photographs online, apparently from Hamilton's collection.  The pictures lack the notations and captions available on the Library of Congress photos, but it is clear that some of the pictures were taken at the same time.  The IAA undertook a painstaking task of digitalizing tens of thousands of documents, maps and photographs from the 1919-1948 period.

    More study of the IAA photographs is required, especially to identify some of Hamilton's reported finds, including a Jewishmikve, a ritual bath, under al Aqsa.  The photos show columns, cisterns, passageways, mosaics, arches, timbers, and layers of ruins beneath the al Aqsa flooring.

    We anxiously await the commentary of Israeli archaeologists, but we share with readers now some of the amazing pictures.

    Click on pictures to enlarge.  Click on caption to see the original.
    
    Vault found. Note pier on left


    
    Cistern

    Trench dug in the flooring. Note levels beneath it

    
    Note the levels
      
    Remains of a mosaic found
    Posted  by Our Mission
    Labels: al Aqsa Mosque British Mandate Antiquities Authority Israel Antiquities Authority Jewish Temple mosaicRobert Hamilton Rockefeller Museum
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  2. Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim (1939)
    The kibbutzim of Ma'aleh Hachamisha and Kiryat Anavim are situated on the highway from Israel's coast to Jerusalem. During Israel's 1948 War of Independence they served as headquarters and bases for the Jewish forces seeking to lift the siege of Jerusalem, protect the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and block the advance of Jordanian armored units.

    A decade prior to the war the photographers of the American Colony photographed the young settlements, their members, industries and children.  The photographers had been chronicling the Jews of Palestine's new and old "Yishuv" since the 1890s.


    The dairy in Ma'aleh Hachamisha (1939)
    Young citizens of Kiryat Anavim (1939)
    The Kiryat Anavim ("City of Grapes") kibbutz was founded in 1920 on land purchased from the neighboring Arab village of Abu Ghosh six years earlier by Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin.  The first settlers were immigrants from the Ukraine.


    The view of the Abu Ghosh village from
    Ma'aleh Hachamisha (1939)
    Police post in Ma'aleh Hachmisha
    Ma'aleh Hachmisha ("Ascent of the Five" -- named for five Jews killed nearby by Arab marauders) was founded by Polish settlers near Kiryat Anavim in 1938 as a "tower and stockade" settlement -- an overnight Jewish building project established in some 57 locations around Palestine to circumvent British settlement restrictions.  Ma'aleh Hachamisha also served as a base during the 1948 War of Independence.  Both communities were located near the 1949 Armistice Line, or "Green Line," between Israel and the occupying Jordanian forces until Israel captured the West Bank of the Jordan River in 1967.

    One picture in the American Colony's collection at the Library of Congress, presented and explained below, is very curious and even troubling. 

    New settlers at Ma'aleh Hachamisha.
    Note the tents behind them.

    A troubling picture: The original caption reads: "Mr. & Mrs.
    A.W. Dilling being shown Hachamisha." Who are the Dillings?
     Click on pictures to enlarge.

    Click on captions to view the originl photographs.


    Why Were the Dillings Visiting this Kibbutz in 1939?

    In the history of anti-Semitism in America in the 20th Century, several names stand out as master-haters of Jews, mass rabble-rousers, and Nazi sympathizers: Catholic Father Charles Coughlin whose venomous radio shows reached tens of millions; Henry Ford who republished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and propagated screeds against the International Jews, the World's Foremost Problem; and  Elizabeth Dilling, a Midwest housewife who emerged as the leader of the pre-World War II "Mother's Movement" opposed to war with Germany and author of malicious books attacking Jews.

    A common belief of all the anti-Semitic racists was that the Jews were behind an international Communist conspiracy to take over America and the world's economy.  Christianity was under an existential threat. "The person who does not know that Jewry and Marxism are synonymous is uninformed," Elizabeth Dilling wrote.

    Enlargement of picture of visit to a kibbutz. Elizabeth Dilling
     in the center, her husband Albert on the right.
    Dilling visited the Communist Soviet Union in 1931 and returned home a crusader against Communism.  She published a massive catalogue of threats to America, The Red Network -- A Who's Who of Radicalism for Patriots, in which thousands of names appeared, including Albert Einstein and leaders of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and National Council of Jewish Women. 

    She wrote The Octopus under a pseudonym to warn of the threat of the "pro-Red, Anti-Christian" B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation League -- "The most colossally financed, coercive spy and propaganda machine in the United States."   In 1964 she co-authored The Plot Against Christianity, later titled The Jewish Religion, Its Influence Today, in which she (mis)quotes extensively from the Jewish Talmud.

    Here are two excerpts from her toxic writing:
    There is no moral, philosophical or ethical conflict whatsoever between Judaism and Marxist collectivism as they exist in actual practice. Marxism, to which all branches of Socialism necessarily adhere, was originated by a Jew, Karl Marx, himself of Rabbinical descent. Every Jewish source today boasts of his rabbinical ancestry. Marx did not actually originate anything, but merely “streamlined” Talmudism for Gentile consumption. 

    Dilling, Nazi sympathizer
    No one who treasures American freedom wants fascism or Hitlerism for America, but it is only fair to note that Germany had 6,000,000 Communists bent on Red terrorist revolution and that Russian Jews had made themselves prominent in the Red movement, and that Nazism has directed its attacks more against conspiring, revolutionary Communist Jews, than against nationalist German Jews who aided Germany during the war.
    So why did the Dillings visit the Ma'aleh Hachamisha kibbutz?

    Prof. Glen Jeansonne, author of Women of the Far Right: The Mothers' Movement and World War II, offers a hint:
    "Dilling's travels in 1938 also took her to Palestine, where, she said, she filmed Jewish immigrantsruining the Holy Land. England had betrayed the Arabs by permitting Jewish immigrants to steal Arab land, she said, but the Arabs blamed the American government, which, they said, was Jewish-controlled."
    We theorize that Dilling went to Palestine, and specifically kibbutzim, to document the eastern European settlers and their socialist, Communist-like, non-Christian lifestyle in which the traditional family structure was revolutionized with children sleeping away from their parents.

    After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth Dilling was indicted with 28 others for sedition.  The trial ended with a mistrial in 1944 when the presiding judge died. 

    Dilling died in 1966, but her writings are still quoted by rightwing anti-Semites like David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
    Posted  by Our Mission
    Labels: 1948 war Elizabeth Dilling Kiryat Anavim Ma'aleh Hachamisha
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  4. Jerusalem under blanket of snow. View from the Christian
    Quarter showing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Mosque
    of Omar on the Temple Mount and Mt. of Olives. (circa 1900)
    Strong rain, winds and snow storms are hitting the Middle East this week.

    After several years of drought, record rains have fallen on Israel presenting the possibility that the Sea of Galilee, Israel's "national reservoir," may fill by the end of winter.  Just this week the sea rose 60 centimeters (2 feet), and many areas in the country already received one-third of their average rainfall. 
    British soldiers at the Western Wall (1921)

    Galilee and Golan mountains are covered with snow, and Jerusalem residents anticipate a city covered in white tomorrow morning.

    We present here old pictures of snow in Jerusalem from the Library of Congress collection. Some of the pictures were presented here last winter, but we've also added new ones found among the 22,000 pictures in the Library of Congress.

    
    Children of the "American Colony" (1921). These pictures were
    hand-colored and found in a family album.


    Children of the "American Colony"
    playing in the snow (1921)












    "Snow-balling" on Jaffa Road in
    Jerusalem (1942)

    Australian soldiers and Arabs "snow-balling" (1942)
    Posted  by Our Mission
    Labels: Galilee Golan Jerusalem snow
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  5. A sign in Jerusalem written in English, French, Arabic and
    Hebrew.  The sign reads "Speed of motor driven vehicles through
    Jerusalem not to exceed 8 miles per hour." (circa 1918, Library
    of Congress Carpenter Collection)
    The Library of Congress photographic archive contains this unusual photograph of a traffic sign from the "Carpenter collection.*"  The sign limited the speed of motor vehicles within Jerusalem to 8 miles per hour.

    "Traffic signs in English, French, Arabic and
    Hebrew. Jerusalem, Palestine." (circa 1918)















    Actually, it is an enlargement taken from a noteworthy picture showing a signpost pointing to "Jaffa Road, Ramleh, Lod (Lydda or Ludd) & Jaffa" to the left and "Hebron Road, Jaffa Gate, Bethlehem & Hebron" to the right. 

    The picture was probably taken soon after the British army captured Jerusalem in December 1917.  We don't know who posed for the picture, but from the background we know exactly where it was taken -- opposite the Old City walls and the "New Gate" into the Christian Quarter. 

    The first building behind the signs is the French Hospital of St. Louis des Français, first established in 1851 inside the Old City. 

    The second is Notre Dame de France (now Notre Dame de Jerusalem) whose cornerstone was laid in 1885.  When it received its first pilgrims in 1888, the center could accommodate 1,600 guests in 400 rooms.

    Barracks for Russian pilgrims in
    Jerusalem (1899)
    As the Ottoman Empire unraveled in the 19th Century, it signed contracts and treaties -- called capitulations -- with countries such as Russia, France, Austria and Germany granting the countries a degree of control over their subjects living in the Ottoman Empire and even autonomy when dealing with their own citizens. 

    The French institutions in this picture -- representing Roman Catholic interests -- competed with the Russian institutions, often representing Eastern Catholics.  The Russian pilgrims' hostel and medical facility were located in the Jerusalem "Russian Compound" which had a clear view of the Old City to the south.  The French facilities were built across the road from the Old City, blocking the Russians' view.
    
    The corner of Jaffa Street and Derech Hatzanchanim
    (Paratroopers Way) in Jerusalem. The hospital is the first building
    and Notre Dame is the second. The Old City wall is on the right.
    Identification was made by comparing the windows, columns and
    protrusions on the roof in both pictures.(credit: Google Maps)



    In 1948, fierce battles took place took place between Arab and Jewish forces around Notre Dame and the St. Louis hospital, and from 1949 until 1967 the area became a no man's line between the Jordanian and Israeli armies. 

    In the 1967 war Israel captured the Old City after heavy fighting.  The two institutions reopened to serve pilgrims and the local Arab population. 
    "X" marks the spot of the 1918 road sign in this map of Jerusalem
    today (credit: Google Maps)
    *According to the Library of Congress, "The Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection consists of photographs produced and gathered by Frank G. Carpenter (1855-1924) and his daughter Frances (1890-1972) to illustrate his writings on travel and world geography. Carpenter's works helped popularize cultural anthropology and geography in the early years of the 20th Century.
    Posted  by Our Mission
    Labels: capitulations Frank Carpenter Hospital of St. Louis Jerusalem Notre Dame Old City
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  6. Two Jewish women (circa 1900)
    In the next few weeks we will publish pictures we discovered in the Library of Congress archives of a vanishing Jewish community.  This picture of two Jewish women is part of the collection.

    Below is a listing of some of the photo essays we posted in the past on vanishing or extinct Jewish communities.
      
    Jews of Aleppo


    Click on the city to view the posting:

    Jews of Aleppo 
    Jews of Alexandria 
    Jews of Constantinople 
    Jews of Damascus 
    Jews of Kifl, Iraq (Ezekiel's Tomb) 

      We are also updating the posting on the Jews of Damascus with these pictures of a Jewish home from approximately 1880 that we recently found.

      
      Courtyard of a Jewish home (Library of Congress, circa 1880)

      Another view of the courtyard













          Click on pictures to enlarge.

          Click on the caption to see the original.
        Posted  by Our Mission
        Labels: Aleppo Alexandria Constantinople Damascus Ezekiel Iraq Jewish community Kifl
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      • New Talbieh neighborhood
        (circa 1925)
        Last month we posted a feature on the "Newer Jerusalem suburbs. Talbieh. A Christian Arab community" along with a picture from the Library of Congress collection.
        An enlargement of the one-story house in the picture on the right






        The Talbieh neighborhood is adjacent to the Jewish neighborhood of Rehavia.  After World War I, the land was sold by the Greek Patriarch to Arab Christians who built homes. British Mandate maps from the 1940s show approximately 90 homes, some residences for foreign consuls.  In the 1930s several Jewish families also moved into the neighborhood.

        After the 1947 UN Partition vote, Arab and Jewish tensions grew. Residents in the Arab and Jewish enclaves in each other's areas left, many expecting to eventually return.  Such was the case with the Arabs of Talbieh. 
         
        The one-story house grew a second story by 1941 when the
        building was converted to the Lady MacMichael British Red
        Cross Convalescent house for British officers

        We focused in our earlier feature on the one-story house and identified it as situated at the corner of what is today Jabotinsky and Yitzhak Elhanan Streets across from the Inbal Hotel.  
        Entrance to the MacMichael House







        Aerial photo of Talbieh (circa 1935) The road going from
        the bottom left to the top right is Jabotinsky Street today. Note
        the two-story building on the corner


        We recently found more pictures of the building in the Library of Congress files, pictures taken at the beginning of World War II when the building was converted into a convalescent house for British officers.
        
         After the British left Palestine in 1948 and the 1949 armistice agreement, the State of Israel became the guardian of the building and made it available for private residence.

        Click on pictures to enlarge.  Click on caption to view the original photo.

        The 5-story house today on the the corner of Jabotinsky Street,
        once Emir Abdullah Street. (Credit: Google Maps, Street View)
          
          


        A side view of the 5-story house
        Posted  by Our Mission
        Labels: Inbal Hotel Jabotinsky Street Jerusalem Talbieh
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      • This film was posted last month by film collector Ya'akov Gross to commemorate the 95th anniversary of the capture of Jerusalem by the British Army.  Gross has posted dozens of historic films on YouTube. 

        This film is, of course, a silent film with a musical score added. The captions are in Hebrew explaining as Allenby meets the commanders of the French and Italian armies, Jerusalem clergymen, and a short young officer named T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia).

        Israel Daily Picture has posted on this website several other films from 100 years ago, including the first film made in the Holy Land in 1897.

        Hat tip: NSP

        Gen. Allenby enters Jerusalem's Old City and
        addresses dignitaries and citizens of Jerusalem
        Posted  by Our Mission
        Labels: British army Gen. Edmund Allenby Ya'akov Gross YouTube
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      • The Library of Congress' photo collection of 22,000 pictures from the century-old American Colony photo department in the Holy Land is a credit to the Library, the curators, the restorers, and, of course, the members of the American Colony, themselves.  
        Our recent postings included evidence that these Christian utopians were "Zionists" well before Theodore Herzl, rejoicing in the return of Jews to Eretz Yisrael.  The choice of photo subjects was remarkably "Jewish-friendly," a fact absent from other studies of the Colony's photos. 

        We also published newly-found pictures from a Scottish university's medical archives where we unexpectedly found photographs of the citizens of Tiberias.

        We present this Table of Contents of more than 290 essays and hundreds of pictures to assist you in viewing this incredible historical treasure.

        Click on the topic to see the original posting. 

         Biblical Sites
        Jerusalem 

        Jewish holidays

        World War I

        Anti-Jewish activity

        Economic activity

        Agricultural Activity 


        Groups (by their origin, religion, ethnicity)

        Ancient towns 

        Jewish Towns -- New
        Children in Ben-Shemen (1920)

        Locations/Events
        Extinct or Vanishing Jewish Communities
        Individuals
         Film clips
        Posted  by Our Mission
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