Tuesday 21st August 1945

After breakfast on Tuesday Aug 21st (???) I joined the tour organised by St. Andrew’s Hostels agent, Mr. Atallah, to the Old City, taken by an Arab guide. This is not a very good way of seeing the Old City. One sees the Holy Places commercialised to an amazing extent and treated with corresponding irreverence. I will not deal with what we saw as I had already seen most of the sights the previous day – on this occasion, however, I did for a suitable fee, procure a microscopic package containing embedded in a piece of wax, an even smaller fragment of rock cut from the rock foundation on which the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built, when the scaffolding was being erected. I also obtained a certificate attesting to the fact that I had made a pilgrimage to the Church. The main attraction for me, however, was the visit to the Temple Area which, without a tremendous amount of trouble, is only possible in this way. We entered a ramshackle looking Moslem Museum Building, just inside a closely guarded gate of the Mosque Area. Here the main exhibits were ossiaries in which the bones were placed a suitable time after burial. They are small boxes of stone. More interesting I found a stained glass window which, from a distance, appeared most beautiful and colourful. Close to, however, it became obvious that it was built up on a rather roughly carved wooden frame not representing any scene or figure, just a sort of complicated fretwork pattern. The back of the wooden frame was a smooth surface and small pieces of coloured glass roughly broken off big enough to completely cover one opening in the wood without overlapping on to the next were apparently indiscriminately stuck together with a white substance somewhat like plaster of Paris. We say various robes and Arabic clothing belonging to different Moslem leaders of the last century, managed to avoid what appeared to be the start of a fight to the death but was in reality only a discussion on one of the exhibits by two Moslems and went outside. We sat on the edge of a sort of raised platform about two feet above the ground on which the huge Dome of the Rock stands. The whole vast courtyard is incredibly untidy looking. Perhaps the Moslem thinks that Allah has chosen to place a few bits of dirty paper, sundry broken stones and bits of sand and dust around the most Holy place in Palestine. Perhaps the Moslem is lazy, I don’t know. But he certainly does leave all sorts of litter lying wherever the wind has blown them, leaves the flagstones (some of which have been cracked for centuries) and allows his children to play and shout as much as they like up and down the temple area. The guide was trying to explain in English the history of the place. The museum we had just visited was in the Mosque el Aksar, the furthest mosque, furthest that is Mecca and Medina at the time when it was built. Near the Jewish wailing wall outside is the spot where, he said, Mohammed tied his wonderful horse on the night when he rode (or flew) up from Mecca to pray in Jerusalem, here, and back to Mecca the same night. Some horse!

We climbed the steps and entered the Dome of the Rock. It is circular, the outer part of the circle being the Mosque proper as used by the Moslems. The centre circle, immediately under the Dome, is the Rock. A flattish area of living rock, limestone, is, as we were told, the original threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. Here Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac and here was the great Jewish Temple. But now of course, no Jew may be allowed to look at the Mosque which covers it.

We passed out of the Dome of the Rock and saw the steps leading down to the great twin arches of the Golden Gate, or the gate beautiful, which are now completely built up. We went out into the Via Dolorosa and saw the Roman Catholic Church of the Flagellation, which is just past the Greek Prison of Christ which Maurice took me to, and the “Sisters of Zion” to which Mrs. Hornestone took us. In a wall is said to be the handprint of Christ, and a Roman Catholic priest’s high pressure salesmanship almost prevented us from seeing the Chapel of St. Veronica. I returned somewhat exhausted, picked up Frank, who persistently refused to visit the Old City, and had lunch.

Maurice’s Jewish friend, Mr. Samuels was conducting a tour from the Jewish Services Club that afternoon, so just to preserve the right balance, I went along there and booked. Mr. Samuels proved to be a rather heavy red faced Jewish gentleman, who was the typical guide not so much in his appearance as in his manner and actions. He started off and took us through the Russian churchyard towards the Damascus gate instead along the crowded modern Jaffa road to the Jaffa gate. “Because” he said “sometimes I might lose some of you if we vas to go that vay and this vay is no farder”. By the time we had got to the Russian church with its flaming onions Mr. Samuels was streaming with perspiration. He stopped and told us that the buildings around which are now used for various purposes, were until the last war hostels for the thousands of poverty stricken Russian peasants who used somehow or other to manage to make the pilgrimage here. Having got so far, they would proceed to go all the rest of the way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (a good half-mile, I should think) on their knees. Now there are no Russian pilgrims, just a few old Russian nuns.

In the grounds he showed us a small shallow excavation, fenced round with a railing. In the centre a long ridge of rock, which appears to have been worked, is obviously (after being told) an unfinished Roman pillar, half cut out of the living rock. It was never finished, possibly because an earthquake cracked it during the working, possibly for other reasons, and the crack appeared later. But there it is, a good example of how the great Roman pillars were made. A little ridge in the rock is utilised, cut away, rounded, undercut, and there is the pillar.

Mr. Samuels had by now recovered so we continued down to the New Gate and along Christian Street tot he Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Mr Samuels became very worked up when he explained to us that he – as a Jew – was not allowed to enter the Church. “They tell me it is because the Jews crucified Christ and I tell them I vos not there two thousand years ago but they will not listen”.

So we had to hire a very loud Moslem guide who seemed to be in a great hurry and showed us nothing I had not already seen. Mr. Samuels – Sammy – as the only civilian with the party, an American doctor, kept calling him, was waiting for us outside and showed us the tomb of Philip d’Aubigny and pointed out the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer as we passed on to the Via Dolorosa. He took us to the Jewish wailing wall. “Here” he said, “is where my people come to bewail the glory they have lost and to beat their heads against the stones. But they are so stupid like that. They are so many who are young and keen and when they come up against some difficulty they will not give in, they are just beating their heads against the wall”. He explained to us that the young men with long locks of hair stretching down immediately in front of their ears who were chanting together their heads bowing forwards and backwards as fast as they could move them were Rabbinic scholars. In the town one sees many around, with queer black soft hats and a light great-coat. He quoted to us the scriptural authorization for not cutting “the corners of thy beard” and explained that in the time of Moses razors were the opposite of safety razors and the temples were considered the most easily damaged part of the human skull. We turned to leave and Mr. Samuels and one of the British police, who are always on duty at this most “explosive” spot in the Middle East, made sundry pleasantries at each other’s expense.

We passed from the Arab quarter to the Jewish quarter up a turning off the Via Dolorosa. On the way we passed a Roman pillar, horizontal and built into the base of a wall. “This” said Mr. Samuels, “was one of the columns in the Street of Columns which ran straight across the Roman city from somewhere near the present Damascus gate to somewhere near the present Zion gate.

We say the so-called handprint of Christ in the wall, “but” said Mr. Samuels, “if there vos one handprint there vos a thousand in Jerusalem, and vere are the others?”. He shepherded us into the Chapel of St. Veronica. An American film corporation are planning, he said, to make a film featuring the life of St. Veronica and they wanted the start of the film to be the present-day Old City of Jerusalem. They were prepared to pay his first-class fare to Hollywood and back if he would go, to act the part of the guide in the film. He did not want to go, but I should imagine that he, as guide, could “make” a film. “But perhaps, now the war is over, I shall be going there” he said.

The Arab and Jewish quarters are divided by an ugly great gate of solid iron, a relic from the riots just before the war. Inside the Jewish quarter we made our way to one of the synagogues. Inside it resembled a nonconformist chapel had it not had a great pulpit-like structure in the centre which is under a dome. We sat down in the seats and Mr. Samuels mounted the “pulpit” and told us the history of the place. It was built by Sir Moses Montefiore the English Jew of the last century. He demonstrated the acoustics by singing a few verses from one of the Psalms in Hebrew. The music seemed to fill the whole synagogue and one of the Jewish servicemen told our guide he would make a good – whatever the Hebrew word for precentor is. He answered several questions and told how the seal of David was made up of the two triangles to become the star of David.

We left the synagogue and walked through the quiet alley-ways of the Jewish and Christian quarters, just inside the wall past the Sion Gate and the Armenian patriarchate, to the English Church opposite the citadel.

Mr. Samuels ushered us in and we sat in the pews again while he told us the history of the church and the many difficulties under which it was built. “You vill notice” he said, “that there is no cross upon the altar. That is for a special reason. If a Jew comes into the church and he sees a cross on the altar he vill turn round and valk straight out. That is because the Jews have so often been persecuted in the name of the Cross. But when this church was built it was hoped that when a Jew came in he might feel at home, and ve appreciate that friendly feeling.”

Somebody objected that all the woodwork of the choir stalls was decorated with little Jerusalem crosses. “O but that is not the same” he said and went on to explain that the 5 crosses were either symbols of the 5 wounds of Christ, or of the 5 areas into which Palestine was divided by the Crusaders.

Next to the churchyard is Toc H and Mr. Samuels pointed out to us the words “Austrian Post Office”, very faded, a relic from the days of Turkish domination when the local post office was so inefficient that foreign embassies provided themselves with a branch of their own national post offices in order to get despatches and mail back from Jerusalem.

So we came to the Jaffa Gate about 6 and left Mr. Samuels to catch his bus, while I returned to dinner and had a walk round the new city in the evening.