Israel Documenting 150,000 Graves on 3000-year-old Mount of Olives Cemetery
Mount of Olives cemetery
JERUSALEM (AP) — A Jewish group in Jerusalem is using 21st-century technology to map every tombstone in the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives, a sprawling, politically sensitive necropolis of 150,000 graves stretching back three millennia.
The goal is to photograph every grave, map it digitally, record every name, and make the information available online. That is supposed to allow visitors to find their way in the cemetery, long a bewildering jumble of crumbling gravestones and rubble surrounded by Arab neighborhoods in east Jerusalem. Beset for many years by neglect, it is among the oldest cemeteries in continuous use in the world.
Around 40,000 graves have been mapped so far by the team, which began work in 2008. They expect to finish recording all of the intact gravestones — an estimated 100,000 in total — by the end of next year. The rest are either so old they are unrecognizable or lie underneath later layers of burial.
Mappers look at aerial photographs, consult handwritten burial records dating back to the mid-1800s, walk along the rows of graves and dig through piles of dislocated tombstones, noting names and dates.
“This place has been used for burial since there have been signs of life in Jerusalem,” said Moti Shamis, a member of the mapping team. “The cemetery is a mirror of the city — in wartime, we see more graves. When new groups of Jews reach the city, the names on the graves change.”
Like so much in Jerusalem, this project is linked to the city’s fraught politics. The mappers are from an organization called Elad, affiliated with the settlement movement, which also works to move Jews into east Jerusalem in an attempt to prevent the city’s division in any future peace deal.
Elad has made it its business to develop sites of Jewish importance in east Jerusalem, reinforcing the Israeli presence in the part of the city the Palestinians want as their capital.
Jews began burying their dead on the hill that later became known as the Mount of Olives about three millennia ago. It was a convenient site a short walk from the city walls. Over the centuries, burial here became linked to a prophecy in the Book of Zecharia according to which the Messiah would approach Jerusalem from the mount, splitting it in two. Those interred on the hill, this belief posited, would be the first to be resurrected.
The mount became, and remains, a sought-after place to be buried for Jews in Israel and abroad.