En Kerem

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Ejn Kerem: Roman Catholic Church of St. John the Baptist , above it Russian-Orth. Cathedral of All Saints of Russia

En Kerem ( Arabic عين كارم, DMG ʿAyn Kārim ; Hebrew עֵין כֶּרֶם ʿEjn Kerem , German for 'source of the vineyard' ) is an ancient settlement within today's city limits of Jerusalem . According to Christian tradition, John the Baptist was born here, so the place is now a destination for pilgrimages .

The reason for the establishment of the place was a water source. Archaeological finds show settlement since the Bronze Age . This is probably the location of the Old Testament Bet Kerem ( Jer 6,1  EU ; Neh 3,14  EU ).

The Bible reports in Luke's Gospel that after the announcement of the birth of Jesus by the angel of Nazareth in Galilee , Mary went "to a town in the mountains of Judea " ( Lk 1.39  EU ) to visit Zacharias and his pregnant wife Elizabeth . Theodosius (530) reports that the place where Elizabeth and Zacharias lived was five miles from Jerusalem.

The most important attraction in En Kerems is the Church of St. John the Baptist, in which the birth cave of John is shown - a Catholic church building from the late 19th century, built on the remains of previous buildings from the Byzantine and Crusader times . Similar to the Paternoster Church , it contains panels with the praise of Zacharias in many languages. There is also the “Gorny Monastery” (mountain monastery) of the Orthodox Church on the opposite slope , construction of which began in 1871. The monastery is run by nuns and is dedicated to the Russian Orthodox Holy Grand Duchess Elisabeth Feodorowna of Hesse-Darmstadt . The construction of the Cathedral of All Saints of Russia , which was started in 1911 but was suspended after the discontinuation of Russian payments due to the First World War and Sovietization, was located on the monastery grounds and was completed in 2005 and consecrated in 2007. The Russian Orthodox "St. John the Baptist Cave Church " is also located on the site .

A little below this monastery is the visiting church , also called "Visitatio Church" or "Magnificat Church". The footpath to this church leads past the "Marienquelle".

The UN partition plan for Palestine adopted by the UN members in 1947 allocated teAyn Karim to the Corpus Separatum Jerusalem . In the war for Israel's independence , the fighting reached ʿAyn Karim on July 9, 1948 and the place was evacuated by most of the remaining inhabitants - except for nuns and monks - on July 10, many had already left the place since April. Zahal took the place on July 11th. It initially remained militarily endangered and largely uninhabited. From December 1948 onwards, refugees from Jerusalem who had become homeless as a result of war and flight began to move to the largely empty place.

After the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus was cleared in the course of the Palestine War in 1948, a replacement building with a medical training center was opened on the hill in En Kerem in 1961 after years of delay.

Web links

Commons : En Kerem  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ G. Ernest Wright: Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research , 71 [Oct. 1938], p. 28 f.
  2. ↑ Carta's Official Guide to Israel and Complete Gazetteer to all Sites in the Holy Land. Jerusalem 1993, ISBN 965-220-186-3 , p. 233 (English).
  3. ↑ Issam Nassar, "Photographing Jerusalem at War: Images from 1948", in: Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and their Fate in the War , Salim Tamari (ed.), Jerusalem: Institute for Palestine Studies in collaboration with Badil, 2002, Pp. 142-166, here p. 157. ISBN 0-88728-274-1 .

Coordinates: 31 ° 46 ′ 3.5 ″  N , 35 ° 9 ′ 39.1 ″  E