The sacred work of Jerusalem's Mekudeshet festival

Though Jerusalem’s 800,000-odd citizens are squeezed into a relatively small space, people of different religious, ethnic, and national traditions tend to live in separate enclaves and rarely interact at more than a superficial level. Orthodox Jews, secular Jews, haredi (or ultra­Orthodox) Jews, Arab Christians, and Arab Muslims may see each other in the street, line up for the same bus or train, and shop in the same malls, but their interactions are usually that limited. The city which in the words of Psalm 122 is “bound firmly together” is anything but.

In 2016, an independent group of Jerusalemites decided to celebrate and explore the city’s diversity with a festival of arts and culture. Called Mekudeshet (derived from the Hebrew word for sacred), the group organized a variety of activities, including an event in Gai Ben Hinnom, the valley known as Gehen­na in the English Bible and familiar to Bible readers as the place where children were sacrificed to the god Moloch.

An assorted group of Christians, Jews, and Muslims gathered around a young Catholic priest, who taught the assembly to sing songs in Hebrew taken from the book of Psalms. Alongside Protestant and Catholic clergy was a group of Coptic priests for whom this was their first encounter with the world outside the Old City of Jerusalem, where they reside. They were thrilled at the opportunity to meet other kinds of Christians and even non-Christians.