In Jerusalem, rabbis are designing a new hi-tech temple. There's only one problem: They want to build it on the holiest place in the city for Muslims.
Palestinian Muslim men pray in
front of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem Photo:
Getty
Rabbi Chaim Richman shows me into a darkened room, strokes his beard and
pulls out his smartphone. He has a specially designed app that works the lights.
The room illuminates. He taps the screen again, and a heavy curtain slides open.
There, resplendent in brilliant gold – and rather smaller than I expected – lies
the Ark of the Covenant.
“This isn’t the real lost ark,” he says. “The real one is hidden about a
kilometre from here, in underground chambers created during the time of
Solomon.” I look at him askance. “It’s true,” he says. “Jews have an unbroken
chain of recorded information, passed down from generation to generation, which
indicates its exact location. There is a big fascination with finding the lost
ark, but nobody asked a Jew. We have
known where it is for thousands of years. It could be reached if we excavated
Temple Mount, but that area is controlled by Muslims.”
Welcome to the Temple Institute exhibition, in the heart of the Old City of
Jerusalem. A
plush, hi-tech gallery, spanning 600 sq ft, it hosts a collection of vestments
and sacred vessels to be used by the Jewish high priest. This is not a museum,
insists Rabbi Richman, 54, the international director of the organisation. Apart
from the Ark of the Covenant, every artefact on display has been painstakingly
created in accordance with Biblical instructions and is intended for actual
service in a “third Jewish temple", which will be built as soon as possible.
Central to the collection is a high priest’s costume made out of azure and
gold thread with a breastplate featuring 12 large gems. Cost: £160,000. There
are also intricate silver trumpets and wooden lyres, pans to collect the blood
of the sacrificial lamb and a large stand for the ritual bread. Outside, on a
platform overlooking the Western Wall,
stands an ornate 1.5-ton candelabra covered in 90kg of gold worth £1.3 million.
All have been designed in consultation with 20 full-time Talmudic
scholars, who the institute pays to study the elaborate,
2,000-year-old laws governing the construction of temple artefacts. But, before
you accuse Richman and his colleagues of being old-fashioned, the Temple
Institute has drawn up plans for the new temple that include two very
contemporary features: a monorail, to transport visitors right to the door, and
a 6ft-high computerised water dispenser with 12 taps so that an entire shift of
priests can wash their hands at once. This, Richman tells me, has been designed
so that a twist of the tap will release the precise amount of water stipulated
in Jewish law.
Read the full article at - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/10287615/The-rabbi-the-lost-ark-and-the-future-of-Temple-Mount.html
Read the full article at - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/10287615/The-rabbi-the-lost-ark-and-the-future-of-Temple-Mount.html
