romantic

On a chilly Jerusalem winter day, one of the best and coziest ways to experience the city is to enjoy a hot drink in a cafe. While there is no shortage of cafes in the city, the best places offer scenic views, comfortable seats, unique stories and rich warm drinks. Here are four different places, […]

With large glass windows looking out onto Derech Bethlehem, shelves filled with colorful tea cups and an aroma of fresh-baked scones, the KumKum Teahouse emits coziness. “This is the kind of place people in Jerusalem have been waiting for,” says Elisheva Levy, the manager and pastry chef at KumKum, which opened this past summer. It […]

There are dozens of natural springs in the hills and forests surrounding Jerusalem.  In fact this system of streams, pools and underground water sources has helped sustain settlement here for more than 3,000 years, providing a source of life for people, crops and animals. Now, many of these springs provide the perfect place for hiking, […]

In a small art studio near the bustling Mahane Yehuda market, a table is covered with freshly-painted ceramic coffee mugs, mezuzot, and tiles. Paint brushes dipped in pale green, pink and purple paint are also scattered on the table.

In the middle of Jerusalem, a large expanse of wild grasses, trees and ponds is now once again home to a growing herd of gazelles. This spring, 11 babies were born, bringing the total number of gazelles to 38. Nestled between the central Katamonim and Givat Mordechai neighborhoods, and bordered by the busy Menachem Begin Expressway, Jerusalem’s Gazelle Valley is a rare patch of nature in the city.

As darkness falls over Jerusalem each Thursday evening during the Hebrew month of Elul, groups of visitors will make their way to Mount Zion. Among the ancient ruins, a tour guide begins to talk about King David, who, according to Jewish tradition, conquered the city and built its first temple.

In the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, a small shop called Elia Photo Service, offers a window to the city’s past. The glass cupboards, walls and countertops are covered with black-and-white photos that Elia Kahvedjian took in and around Jerusalem and other parts of Israel for more than six decades, beginning in the 1920s. There are photos of camels in the desert, horse-drawn carts on Jaffa Road, and the interior of the Old City’s Hurva Synagogue before it was destroyed in the 1948-49 war.

When Eli Weisberger began renovating a small shop on Jeruslaem’s Emek Refaim Street to make it into a wine bar, he made a surprising discovery: This building once served as a wine storage cellar for the Templers, a group of Christians from German who settled in the holy land in the late 1800s. It was the Templers who built many of the stone, red-roofed buildings in the German Colony along Emek Refaim.

A red-headed boy leads his sheep across a grassy field, interspersed with trees. The music of a flute plays and the rolling, rocky hills of Judea rise in the background. These are the opening scenes of the new evening sound and light show King David, which transforms the 1,000-year old stone walls of the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem’s Old City into a surround-sound movie theater five nights a week. Once the sun sets, David and his story come to life in this Crusader-era citadel via 18 laser projectors and 20 speakers.

A Place for Art and Culture; old and new

Before the state of Israel was established, botanist Baruch Chizik and artist Aharon HaLevy traveled around rural Palestine, cataloguing all of the plants they encountered. Chizik studied and identified the various flowers and cacti while HaLevy painted them.
It was part of a larger cooperative scene of scientists, artists and linguists who worked together to find, document, and even create modern Hebrew names for the plants growing in the Holy Land.