Avir at the Gates
From the top of the Mount of Olives, Avir is looking through the gates to a scene that is familiar to many visitors in Jerusalem, the 150,000 gravestones that cover the entire western and much of the southern slopes of this Mount, which has been used as a Jewish cemetery for over 3,000 years.
The Mount of Olives, where according to the Bible in Zechariah 14:4, those buried here will be resurrected when the Messiah comes. The earliest tombs are located at the foot of the mountain in the Kidron Valley, where great men of history were also buried. Some of them were: King David’s rebellious son Absalom; the First Temple priest Zechariah; another bears an inscription mentioning the sons of Hezir, a priestly family that lived 2,000 years ago.
Jewish burial here continued throughout the centuries, interrupted only between 1948 and 1967 when Jerusalem was divided.