Abu Tor Tour

Every so often, one of the administrators from the Senior Educators Program offers guided tours to the participants and their families. Today we took advantage of this opportunity to walk with a small group from the Tayelet, the scenic overlook of Jerusalem, through the neighbourhood of Abu Tor. The unifying theme of the walk was the linkage of the land's geographical and philosophical past with its present. We examined maps and the scenery to understand why the city developed as it did, and discussed quotations from the Bible and modern poetry to understand the psychology of the region. One of the most interesting statements that came out of the tour was made in the neighbourhood of Abu Tor, where a street and bullet-pocked wall mark the boundary between Jordan and Israel as it existed before 1967, and where the Jewish and Muslim residents of the are still largely divided by clear geographic boundaries. The leader of the group summed up the tour by saying something like, "it's interesting that in this region where one man nearly sacrificed what he held most dear, the residents still daily grapple with the threat that they, too, will have to sacrifice for this land."