Standing at the top of the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, with the sun shining over the ancient tombstones and glistening off the roof of the Dome of the Rock, it’s easy to appreciate the historical significance of the world’s oldest Jewish cemetery — and to see how its location in the heart of Arab East Jerusalem makes it a powderkeg for political unrest.

The terraced mountainside — situated across the Kidron Valley from Jerusalem’s Old City and the Temple Mount to the west, venerated by all three major religions and surrounded by Arab neighborhoods — is believed to be the final resting place for as many as 150,000 Jews over a span of 3,000 years, including sages, prophets, and Zionist leaders. Every subdivision, tombstone and cave is laden with stories and secrets.

To Jeff Daube, chairman of the Israel executive committee of the International Committee for Har Hazeitim (ICHH), a group dedicated to restoring and protecting the cemetery, it’s a national treasure that far more people need to visit.

“To me, Har Hazeitim [Hebrew for the Mount of Olives] is all about education,” Daube, a career teacher and political activist, told The Times of Israel on a tour of the Mount of Olives. “What we have here is the pantheon of Jewish, Zionist and rabbinic leadership, an unrivaled textbook of Jewish history. What we want to do is bring more young people, tourists, students, and soldiers up here to learn about it.”

ICHH was formed in 2010 after a scathing report by then-state comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss found the site in a terrible state of disrepair, marred by “vandalism and criminal activity.”

The organization has spent the last 15 years working to rehabilitate the Mount of Olives and boost its security. Recently, it began work on a new NIS 25 million ($7.7 million) visitor center, set to be opened at the end of 2026.

In spite of its contentious location next to a mosque in the Arab neighborhood of Ras Al-Amud, the visitor center is a project that Daube insists will be completely apolitical. But not all are convinced it isn’t something more sinister.

“There is no political agenda of any sort for this beyond Jewish education. The center’s message will be designed to give over this important part of the Jewish story to visitors of all political stripes,” Daube said.

However, organizations such as Emek Shaveh, which opposes what it sees as the politicization of archaeological sites in East Jerusalem, see the new building as part of a larger right-wing strategy to assert greater Jewish control over Arab neighborhoods.

“The new center is yet another piece in the puzzle of settler-led tourist sites designed to cement Israeli control through a sustained Jewish presence,” Emek Shaveh CEO Alon Arad said in a statement to The Times of Israel. “These initiatives are likely to further threaten human rights [in] Palestinian communities and heighten tensions in the area.”

The 250-dunam (62-acre) Mount of Olives cemetery sits on a two-mile mountain ridge that runs from Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus in the north down toward the “Mount of Corruption” in the south, a site associated with idol worship during the First Temple period. The mountain ridge, also referred to as the Mount of Olives, acts as a watershed, separating the city of Jerusalem from the Judean Desert lying to its east.

The terrain of the cemetery, rising above the Tomb of Zechariah and Absalom’s Pillar, is formed of chalky limestone that lends itself much better to digging burial plots and caves than to construction, Daube noted. Its location next to the ancient city of Jerusalem made it the obvious place to inter the dead, due to a religious prohibition from burying people within the city.

The cemetery retained its sanctity after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, and for centuries afterward, Jews would climb the Mount of Olives to gaze at the ruins of the holy site and mourn it.

An estimated 38,000 gravestones in the cemetery were destroyed when the area came under Jordanian control in 1948. After Israel conquered the land in 1967, many of these were identified by Abed Sayd, the legendary caretaker of the cemetery and fourth-generation gravedigger with a photographic memory who knew the lay of the land by heart.

Among the estimated 150,000 Jewish bodies buried along the mountain, the most famous include the supposed burial places of the biblical prophets Haggai, Malachi, Zechariah and Hulda; 18th-century sage Ḥayyim ben Moshe ibn Attar, popularly known by the name of his Torah commentary, Ohr Hachaim; Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook; Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner; “father of modern Hebrew” Eliezer Ben‑Yehuda;........

© The Times of Israel