The Mount of Olives is a mountain ridge to the east of Jerusalem. It is named after the olive trees that grow there. At the foot of the Mount of Olives is the Gardens of Gethsemane where Jesus stayed in Jerusalem. The Mount of Olives is the site of many important Biblical events. Roman soldiers from the 10th Legion camped on the Mount during the Siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 AD, which lead to the destruction of the city.
The Mount of Olives is identified in the Book of Zechariah as the place from which God will begin to redeem the dead at the end of days. For this reason, Jews have always sought to be buried there, and from Biblical times to the present day the mountain has been used as a cemetery for the Jews of Jerusalem. There are an estimated 150,000 graves on the Mount, and among the tombs there include those of many famous figures such as Zechariah (who prophesied there) (though, it is most likely not the prophet's actual tomb), Yad Avshalom (likewise, almost certainly not Yad Avshalom's actual tomb), and a host of great rabbis from the 15th to the 20th centuries including Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel.
The Mount of Olives suffered much damage when under the control by Jordan between the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and 1967, with Jordanians using the gravestones from the cemetery for construction of roads and army latrines, including gravestones from millennia-old graves. The late King Hussein permitted the construction of the Intercontinental Hotel at the summit of the Mount of Olives together with a road that cut through the cemetery which destroyed hundreds of Jewish graves, some of which were from the First Temple Period. Some fifty thousand Jewish graves out of a total seventy thousand were destroyed or defaced during the nineteen years of Jordanian rule. After the Six-Day War, the Israelis painstakingly repatriated as many of the surviving gravestones as possible. The modern neighborhood of at-Tur is located on the mountain's summit.
Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives Photo: Daniel Maleck Lewy, GNU Free Documentation License
Find lowest price for your Hotel Room
Before booking a hotel room, make sure you are getting the lowest price for it. Different hotel booking websites offers the same room at different prices. If you stick with one site all the time, you could be paying more for the same room. Now why pay more?
The form below is a Research Engine. It doesn't take bookings. Instead it lets you find the hotel booking website that offers the room you want at the lowest price. You can see and compare what different sites are offering, and then click to choose the one with the best price. Do this, and you're guaranteed to save a whole lot of money on your room reservations!
Our Flight Checker helps travelers compare flights and get the lowest fare for their trips. If you're flying somewhere, use our Flight Checker to compare the rates from different airlines. To use it, enter where you will be flying from, where you will be flying to, your departure date and return date. Select the number of passengers, and then click search.
Our engine will return you a list of possible flights that you can take. You can compare the fare of different airlines for your trip. Click on your selected airline, and we transfer you to the airline website.
