Page 12 - Holyland Magazine - 2023 Edition

A t t h e h e a r t o f I s r a e l

AnaRina Kreisman
Director: Align With Zion
erusalem was rated the fastest-growing “Go through, go through the gates, clear ye following the Balfour Declaration. After yet
tourist destination in 2019, with Israel the way of the people; cast up, cast up the another 50-year cycle, the city was reunited in
welcoming a record-breaking 4.55 million highway, gather out the stones; lift up an 1967. It, therefore, came as no surprise that
tourists. Then COVID struck and all the ensign over the peoples.” - Isaiah 62:10. after a third Jubilee cycle, President Trump
Jgates closed. Many were left with a deep officially acknowledged Jerusalem as the
yearning to return to Jerusalem. Slowly the Israel is preparing itself for this reality, as the Eternal Capital of the Jewish People in 2017.
dark cloud of COVID and mandates lifted, and world’s focus is drawn toward Jerusalem.
the trickle of tourists returned to a full-stream Unbeknownst to most, the true location of In the same decade that Jerusalem was
river. ancient Biblical Jerusalem, the City of David – rediscovered in the 1860s, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda
resuscitated the Hebrew language. During that
In the meantime, more and more building situated 200 yards south and outside the walls time, we witnessed the first Aliyah wave as the
cranes have started to sprout up all over the of what is known today as the Old City – was Jewish people started their return to the Land
Holy City and the highways are continually only rediscovered by Sir Charles Warren 150 of Israel.
under construction to compensate for the years ago, that’s three jubilee cycles ago, in
rapid growth. But this should not come 1867. The actual location faded slowly into All of these historic events are deeply
as a shock. After all, urban planners were obscurity over a 2,000-year period. interlinked with each other.
sufficiently forewarned about this – 2,800 Fifty years after the city’s rediscovery in 1867, “And many peoples shall go and say: 'Come
years ago! The memo itself can be found on Britain’s General Edmund Allenby liberated and let us go up to the mountain of the L-RD,
every Bible believer’s bookshelf. Jerusalem from the Ottomans in 1917, to the House of the G-d of Jacob; and He

Going up to

Jerusalem

View to the Old City.
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Photo: Noam Chen, IMOT