Sunday. Bright and breezy this morning, up at 6 am for the service at the Holy Sepulchre.
Jerusalem was almost empty this morning as we walked to the church.
Inside the church, what a contrast to the other day, peaceful and quiet - no tourists !
As we arrived the Coptics were at their end of the church singing their service - just two priests. Sounded great. The Roman Catholics had one of their services at the Tomb, which was in Latin. We stayed a little while listening to the Catholics, and then wandered around the almost deserted church. In the Greek Orthodox section upstairs there was a priest asleep on the steps to the pulpit. We went into the main body of the church and as we wandered up to look at the altar, we obviously upset one of the old women as she started to come over jabbering at us - we took our leave swiftly.
Got back to the hostel in time for breakfast, and then went to the cathedral (more like a small church !) at ST George's for the 9.30 Holy Communion service which was in Arabic and English.
In the afternoon took a taxi to the Israeli Museum. Lots to see, but in particular the Qumran scrolls, where there is a complete scroll of Isaiah.
The scrolls have parallel lines drawn on and the letters of the Hebrew script was hung from these lines.
They have all the books of the Bible and the Apocrypha, and an extra Psalm.
Walked from there through the Rose Garden to the Supreme Court (one of our group is a lawyer) but we'd missed the tours, so we walked back to the hostel through Jerusalem.
In the evening we had a talk by a Rabbi from Rabbi for Human Rights, the only Jewish human rights organisation.