ABSTRACT
The process by which holy places are created and turn into pilgrimage sites has been the focus of considerable research in recent years. Numerous scholars representing a variety of disciplines have turned their attention to this fascinating phenomenon and to the way in which it affects the spaces in question. In the Holy Land the sites identified as sacred have always been of great importance and their influence on local history has been extensive. Due to the region’s status as the cradle of the three great monotheistic religions, tens of holy sites have emerged here, some of which have been revered jointly by local residents of differing faiths. These sacred places developed via a process that extended over many generations-a process that was frequently affected by the interplay of social, cultural and political forces in the region. There is a clear connection between the way in which the map of the Holy
Land’s sacred sites developed and the various regime changes that took place there. The region’s successive occupiers and rulers continually redrew the outlines of this map, and the many wars that raged in Palestine over the centuries were crucial to the glorification of the holy places or, alternatively, to their disappearance. It appears that, of all the wars that took place in the region, the 1948 Arab-Israel War was the one that had the most far-reaching consequences for sacred space in the Holy Land. Surprisingly, despite the fact that this conflict has been investigated from a number of perspectives,1 its effects on the distribution and status of the holy sites have never yet been addressed: this issue will be the focus of the present article. The geopolitical changes to which the Holy Land’s inhabitants were subjected after the territorial partition of 1948, and the fact that many of the holy sites at which the region’s Jews worshiped prior to 1948 became inaccessible thereafter, led to a reshaping of sacred space within the State of Israel and to the creation of an alternative map of Jewish holy sites, most of which had not existed before the land was divided. Although it is true that the adherents of other religions in the area were also deeply affected by the outcome of the war and were also unable at times to visit their sacred sites, this situation nevertheless appears to have had a particularly strong impact on the Jews who were cut off from such sites of historical and religious centrality as the Western Wall, Rachel’s Tomb, and the Cave of the Patriarchs.
