Mount of Olives

This guide to Jerusalem's Mount of Olives starts with a hotel driveway paved in broken Hebrew tombstones and traces why families across the Jewish world, from Vilna to Baghdad, paid enormous sums for three thousand years to bury their dead on this exact ridge facing the Old City. It follows what changed here in 1948, when Jordan took control of East Jerusalem and this ancient cemetery was closed off for nineteen years, and what soldiers did with its stones. Look down toward the Kidron Valley as you listen.