55 Fun Facts About Jerusalem

Jerusalem sits on a plateau in which upland region, between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea?

The Judaean Hills form a watershed: Jerusalem's western slopes catch the Mediterranean rain, while the land just east of the city lies in a rain shadow and falls away as desert toward the Dead Sea.

Muslims first prayed facing Jerusalem before turning toward which city?

Mecca: tradition says the order to turn came in the middle of a prayer in Medina, more than a year after the move there, and the mosque where it happened is still called the Mosque of the Two Qiblas.

Which international contest did Jerusalem host in 1979 and 1999?

Eurovision: Israel won in 1978 and again at home in Jerusalem in 1979, then declined to host twice running, and the next contest fell on a national memorial day, so the reigning champions did not even enter.

Many scholars trace the name Jerusalem to which Canaanite god of dusk?

Shalem, twin of the dawn god Shahar, is widely proposed as the root of Urusalim, the city's name in Egypt's Amarna letters. The same consonants give shalom, hence the traditional reading 'city of peace'.

Which name, first used for a Jebusite fortress, became a poetic byword for all Jerusalem?

Zion is a name that kept moving: first the fortress on the south-eastern ridge, then the Temple hill, and finally the western hill that is still called Mount Zion today.

What is the most common Arabic name for Jerusalem, meaning 'the holy'?

Al-Quds is a latecomer, first recorded centuries after the Arab conquest; earlier writers called the city Bayt al-Maqdis, 'the holy house', a name that echoes the Hebrew term for the Temple.

According to the Hebrew Bible, which king captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites and made it his capital?

David took the Jebusite stronghold, in one version of the biblical account by sending his men up a water shaft.

Which empire destroyed Jerusalem's First Temple in the early 6th century BCE?

Babylonian forces under Nebuchadnezzar burned the Temple along with the rest of the city and deported Judah's elite to Babylon, the start of the Babylonian exile.

Which Roman general brought Jerusalem under the Republic's rule in 63 BCE?

Pompey was drawn in by two Hasmonean brothers fighting over the throne, stormed the Temple precinct after a three-month siege and walked into the Holy of Holies, yet left its treasure untouched.

Which Roman general, later emperor, led the siege that destroyed Jerusalem's Second Temple?

Titus: the arch built in his honour in Rome shows soldiers carrying off the Temple's menorah, and that carving became the model for the emblem of the State of Israel.

Which name did Emperor Hadrian give the Roman colony he built on the ruins of Jerusalem?

Aelia Capitolina joined Hadrian's family name, Aelius, to the Capitoline gods led by Jupiter, recasting the ruined Jewish capital as a pagan colony. 'Aelia' outlived Rome and was still the city's name in early Arabic.

Caliph Umar's army took Jerusalem in the 630s from which empire?

Byzantine: tradition says Patriarch Sophronius would surrender only to the caliph in person, and that Umar then declined to pray inside the Holy Sepulchre so the church would not be claimed as a mosque.

The Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099; who recaptured it for Islam in 1187?

Saladin accepted a negotiated surrender and let the inhabitants buy their freedom, a pointed contrast with 1099, when the Crusaders had massacred the city's Muslims and Jews.

The walls that still ring Jerusalem's Old City were rebuilt in the 16th century under which Ottoman sultan?

Suleiman the Magnificent's walls ended some three centuries in which Jerusalem stood largely unwalled: its defences had been pulled down in 1219 for fear the Crusaders would retake the city and use them.

About how many square kilometres lie inside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City?

About 1 square kilometre, and until the 1860s that was the whole of Jerusalem: overcrowding inside the walls pushed the first new quarters, Mishkenot Sha'ananim among them, out onto the hills beyond.

Which of the Old City gates was added to Suleiman's wall in 1887, long after the others?

Suleiman's builders had left the Golden Gate open at first, then bricked it up; two minor gates were reopened by archaeologists in modern times.

The Western Wall is a retaining wall of which artificially expanded hilltop?

Its lower courses of huge stones are Herodian; the whole western retaining wall runs 488 metres, far beyond the famous prayer section.

By what short Hebrew name do Jews commonly refer to the Western Wall?

The Kotel is short for HaKotel HaMa'aravi, simply 'the Western Wall'. 'Wailing Wall' was a name European visitors gave it for the mourning they saw there, and Jews themselves rarely use it.

What do visitors traditionally tuck into the cracks of the Western Wall?

Written prayers: twice a year, before Rosh Hashanah and Passover, the notes are cleared from between the stones unread and buried on the Mount of Olives, because prayers may not simply be thrown away.

The Dome of the Rock was built in 691–692 CE on the orders of which Umayyad caliph?

Abd al-Malik's name is no longer on his own building: a 9th-century Abbasid caliph, al-Ma'mun, had it cut out of the founding inscription and his own put in, but left the original date in place.

What is the basic shape of the Dome of the Rock's floor plan?

Octagonal, a layout borrowed from the Christian shrines of the region that were built around a holy spot, and its dome is almost exactly as wide as the one over the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Before glazed tiles replaced it in the 16th century, what covered the upper outer walls of the Dome of the Rock?

Glass mosaics, like those that still line the interior, once covered the upper outer walls as well. The tiles that replaced them were themselves swapped for modern copies in the 20th century, so the inside is the older face.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is believed to contain the site of the crucifixion, known as Calvary or what?

Golgotha and Calvary both mean 'skull', one from Aramaic and one from Latin. The Gospels put the site outside the city, and it lies within the walls today only because Jerusalem later grew around it.

Which Roman emperor supported the original 4th-century construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?

Constantine had a pagan temple raised under Hadrian pulled down to clear the site, and tradition credits his mother Helena, then visiting Jerusalem, with finding the True Cross there.

Families of which faith have for centuries held the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?

Muslim: two Jerusalem families share the duty, one keeping the key and the other opening the door, a role their own tradition explains as that of a neutral guardian among the rival Christian communities.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the seat of the Greek Orthodox, Latin and which other patriarchate?

A famous 'immovable ladder' has stood beneath a facade window for centuries because no community may alter the shared status quo.

What does 'Via Dolorosa' mean in Latin?

Sorrowful Way: late-medieval pilgrims were led along it backwards, starting at the site of the crucifixion and working back to Pilate's house, the opposite of the direction Jesus is said to have walked.

Which garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives is where the Gospels say Jesus was arrested?

Gethsemane: John's Gospel says Judas knew where to bring the arresting party because Jesus had often met his disciples there.

Which valley separates the Mount of Olives from the Old City?

Kidron: its slopes are lined with rock-cut tombs, the grandest being the so-called Tomb of Absalom, which was in fact carved roughly a thousand years after the biblical prince it is named for.

Jerusalem's Valley of Hinnom gave its name to which word for hell?

Gehenna is the Greek form of Ge-Hinnom, 'valley of Hinnom'. The Bible says children were burned there in sacrifice, and the name of the cursed valley became a name for the place of punishment itself.

The first settlement of Jerusalem grew up beside which water source?

The Gihon Spring was the only one on the site and fixed where the city began. A rock-cut tunnel credited to King Hezekiah later carried its water to a pool inside the city.

Under the 1947 UN Partition Plan, Jerusalem was to have what status?

An international city: the plan set Jerusalem apart as a 'corpus separatum' run by the UN and belonging to neither state, but it was overtaken by the 1948 war, which left the city cut in two instead.

After the 1949 armistice, East Jerusalem, including the Old City, was controlled by which country?

Jordan signed an armistice that promised free access to the Jewish holy places, but the clause was never honoured, and for nineteen years Israelis could not reach the Western Wall.

From 1923 to 1948 Jerusalem served as the administrative capital of what?

Mandatory Palestine was at first run from a hospice the German Kaiser had built for pilgrims on the ridge east of the city: it housed the British high commissioner until an earthquake wrecked it in 1927.

A century-old rule requires every building in Jerusalem, old or new, to be faced with what?

Local limestone, known as Jerusalem stone: Ronald Storrs, military governor after the city's capture in the First World War, insisted on it, and the rule has given old and new districts the same pale, unified look.

Israel's parliament, located in Jerusalem, is called what?

The Knesset took both its name and its 120 seats from the Great Assembly, the council of sages that tradition places at the head of the Jewish people in the 5th century BCE.

Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial, stands on the slope of which hill?

Mount Herzl took its name in 1949, when the remains of Theodor Herzl, buried in Vienna 45 years earlier, were brought to the state he had dreamed of and reburied on its summit.

Which architect designed the new Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum that opened in 2005?

Moshe Safdie drove the museum through the hill as a triangular concrete prism, mostly underground and lit by a single long skylight, so that visitors emerge at the far end onto a balcony over the Jerusalem hills.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are housed in an urn-shaped building at the Israel Museum called what?

The Shrine of the Book reunited the first seven scrolls, found by Bedouin shepherds in 1947: Hebrew University scholars soon bought three, but the other four were taken to the United States and bought back for Israel only years later.

Which mayor served Jerusalem for 28 years, from 1965 to 1993?

Teddy Kollek was the driving force behind the Israel Museum and the Jerusalem Theatre, and he left office only at the age of 82, beaten at the polls by a future prime minister, Ehud Olmert.

Which American family's fortune paid for the archaeological museum that opened beside Jerusalem's Old City walls in 1938?

Rockefeller money, two million dollars pledged by the oil baron's son, built a museum that opened under another official name, but it was the donor's that stuck.

Which Jerusalem club had won Israel's top league six times by 2025, unlike rival Hapoel?

Beitar Jerusalem grew out of Betar, the youth movement of the Zionist right, while rival Hapoel belongs to a sports body founded by the labour unions, so their derby carried a political edge from the start.

Which silver-domed mosque shares an esplanade with the Dome of the Rock?

Al-Aqsa became the Crusaders' royal palace and then the headquarters of a new order of knights, who called the building the Temple of Solomon and so became known as the Templars.

Which architect designed the Chords Bridge for Jerusalem's light rail?

Santiago Calatrava's 66 cables are the chords of the name: strung from a single leaning mast, they have been read as the strings of a giant harp at the city's entrance.

What rare weather cut Jerusalem off by road in 2013 and stranded hundreds of drivers?

A snowstorm: snow is infrequent in Jerusalem, and this December fall was heavy enough to close the roads into the city and to have the army called out to rescue the people stuck in their cars.

Which artist made the twelve stained-glass windows of the synagogue at Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital?

Marc Chagall made twelve windows because each stands for one of the twelve tribes of Israel, and they turned the synagogue of a working hospital into one of the city's tourist sights.

Which ruler rebuilt Jerusalem's Second Temple on a grand scale in the 1st century BCE?

Herod the Great had priests trained as masons and carpenters so that no layman need set foot in the sanctuary, and the inner shrine they built is said to have taken only a year and a half.

Which British general entered Jerusalem on foot in 1917?

Edmund Allenby walked in through the Jaffa Gate, beside the gap the Ottomans had cut in the city wall in 1898 for the German Kaiser's grand entry.

In which war did Israel capture East Jerusalem, uniting the city under its control?

The Six-Day War reached the Old City on its third day, when paratroopers broke in through the Lions' Gate; soon afterwards the houses crowding the Western Wall were cleared to open the plaza in front of it.

After Israel's 1980 Jerusalem Law, a UN resolution called on countries to withdraw what from the city?

Their embassies: all thirteen countries that kept one in Jerusalem moved it out, mostly to Tel Aviv, so a law meant to cement the city's standing as capital emptied it of embassies instead.

Which permanent member vetoed a 2017 UN Security Council resolution on Jerusalem that every other member backed?

The US cast the lone veto on 18 December 2017, days after recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital; the General Assembly then passed a similar text by 128 votes to 9.

The road east from Jerusalem drops more than a kilometre in altitude to which city, the lowest on Earth?

Jericho lies about 258 metres below sea level and Jerusalem some 760 above, which is why the traveller in the Good Samaritan parable goes 'down from Jerusalem to Jericho'.

Violence in which conflict shut Jerusalem's Atarot Airport to civilian flights?

The Second Intifada closed Atarot, also called Jerusalem International Airport, in 2000 and for good, leaving Ben Gurion, near Tel Aviv, as the airport for the city.

Jerusalem's Yitzhak Navon station, 80 metres underground, was built to double as what?

A bomb shelter: planners gave the Tel Aviv line's terminus a second job as an emergency refuge for thousands. It sits so deep because trains climbing to the hill city can manage only a gentle gradient.

Which two famous intellectuals sat on the Hebrew University's first Board of Governors?

Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud joined Martin Buber and Chaim Weizmann on the first board, and Einstein later willed the university his papers and the rights to them.