D. Appleton & Co., a publisher based in New York, released Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt in 1882, a series of 40 semi-monthly magazines with a goal was to bring the most complete description of Palestine and its surrounding area.
Each issue cost 50 cents (about $15 today) and was richly illustrated with line engravings on steel and drawings on wood—sketched on the spot by two artists, Harry Fenn and J.D. Woodward.
This description of Jerusalem was written by Sir Charles Wilson ,who first came to Palestine in 1864 as part of a team of six Royal Engineers in the British army to undertake a scientific mapping of Jerusalem. He returned in 1867 to conduct a major excavation of the Temple Mount on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund, a British society created to study Palestine.
This is the drawing of the Western Wall included in one of the issues about Jerusalem, in which Wilson writes:
“Jews may often be seen sitting for hours at the Wailing-place bent in sorrowful meditation over the history of their race, and repeating oftentimes the words of the 79th Psalm. On Fridays especially, Jews of both sexes, of all ages, and from all countries assemble in large numbers to kiss the sacred stones and weep outside the precincts they may not enter.”
We are more than 13 months into a very difficult time for Israel. Perhaps we can find comfort in the song “Od Yishama,” which we typically sing at weddings:
“Yet again there shall be heard in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.”
Decisions made by Israel’s government will decide whether the voices of joy and gladness will be heard again in the streets of Jerusalem sooner… or later.
The collection which I share weekly in this column sits safely in my Toronto home. My fellow collector, Hadi Orr, stores his tens of thousands of pieces of Israeliana in a commercial space in Ramat Gan, Israel.
On Nov. 18, a Hezbollah missile struck the building next door to his, injuring five people. Hadi’s collection was severely damaged. This made me reflect on how people in Israel live daily with the knowledge that everything (and more importantly, everyone) they care about can be destroyed at any time, literally from something falling from the sky. This is not normal and we cannot allow ourselves to be desensitized to it. Collections tell our story which, like Israel, will not be destroyed.
