Yemin Moshe

After returning from Yad Vashem in the afternoon, Judy and I decided to talk a walk through Bloomfield Garden across the street from the hotel. Kay had mentioned that there was an artist’s colony on the other side of the Hinnom Valley from the Old City. It was a lovely area, with especially good views of the Old City wall..

This is the back of the King David Hotel.

Another view of the Dormition Abbey…

Here is the entrance to the Artist’s Colony. The tower that you see in the distance with the fortifications around it is the Citadel and David’s Tower.

This was the most gorgeous bougainvillea.

The path not taken…

This was the front of some of the houses. The area is actually called Yemin Moshe. In 1860 a British philanthropist, Moses Montefiore, built new housing on the hill overlooking the Old City to help relieve the crowding and the poverty in the Jewish Quarter. It has now become very pricey and few artists can afford to call the area home.

This is part of the ancient aqueduct system that has supplied water to Jerusalem up until the 20th century.

This picture is of the bridge in the 1860s. The picture is from this article.

It was a lovely afternoon for a wedding. I bet she didn’t know that she had an additional photographer. Ha!

The windmill, was originally built to serve the milling needs of the residents of Montefiore's new developments, but it was never operational because of the lack of wind where it was situated.

A restaurant is located just down the stairs from the windmill, which offers a spectacular view of the Old City walls. An alternate route into the Old City is to walk down the stairs past the windmill and through the Yemin Moshe gates to the street and walk across and up the hill to Zion Gate. This takes you into the city right near the Jewish Quarter and is a relatively quick way to get to the Western Wall. I wish we would have found out about this earlier in our visit.

I copied this image off of the internet because it shows our hotel behind the windmill.

The ridge you see in the distance with what looks like a wall on it is Mt. Scopus.

This is St. Andrew’s Church of Scotland. It was built in the 1930’s to commemorate the Scottish soldiers who died in World War I fighting the Turks, bringing an end to Ottoman rule over Palestine. It was the dying wish of Robert the Bruce that his heart be buried in Jerusalem. There is a plaque in the floor of the church that commemorates his wish.