The Church of the Redeemer

I visited the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer with Max and Brooke on my first foray into the Old City this morning. This church with its lofty bell tower is a good example of the efforts of various European powers to acquire and maintain a presence in the Holy City over the past thousand years. Buiolt by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, this church was dedicated in 1898, constructed over the remains of an 11^th century church, St. Mary of the Latins, which had been built by wealthy merchants from Italy. This Italian church is thought to have been built over an even earlier church dating back to the 5^th century. Thus, the cultural humus of many hundreds and thousands of years has accumulated in this marvelous place.

I noted that the hymnals in the chapel of the Church of the Redeemer were in German, and Max and Brooke tell me the services here are conducted in German, although the factotum at the door gave me only a blank stare as I asked him about it in German. The most marvelous feature of the church is the soaring bell tower, which we ascended by means of several very narrow corkscrew staircases. The panoramic view at the top, however, was well worth the climb.

The Old City

On the morning of my arrival in Jerusalem Max and Brooke took me in tow and we spent several hours in the Old City, exploring the Christian, Jewish and Armenian Quarters, visiting the Church of the Redeemer, the Russian Orthodox Alexander Hospice (which also is a shrine to the 8^th Station of the Cross) and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We also saw the Western Wall in the distance from the rooftops and especially from the great bell tower of the Church of the Reedemer. (More about all of those sites in subsequent posts).

The Old City is filled with a fascinating mix of peoples, wares, religious objects, sights and smells. This is, after all the place where the boundaries of race, religion and politics merge most dramatically. Walking down the narrow, dark streets—some covered, some in the open air—you may see in one sequence Hasidic Jews with books in their hands, Arab merchants, Catholic nuns, tourists from many nations, Orthodox priests and Israeli soldiers with automatic weapons in their hands.