The Mount of Olives is a series of hills, which were once dotted with olive trees, situated directly east of the Temple mount. One day the Messiah will come through the Golden Gate (or Gate of Mercy) of the Old City and bring about the resurrection of the dead in the cemetery on the mount.

Sadly, the grave stones have not been preserved well, many are broken and scattered.

The cemetery on the southern ridge, the location of the modern village of Silwan, was the burial place of the city’s most important citizens in the period of the Biblical kings. There are an estimated 150,000 graves on the mount. Notable people buried there include Nahmanides, the Ramban, the Ben Ish Hai, many chief rabbis, and former Isareli Prime Minister Menahem Begin.

The religious ceremony marking the start of a new month was held on the Mount of Olives in the days of the Second Temple. After the destruction of the Temple, the festival of Sukkot was celebrated there. It has became a traditional place for lamenting the Temple’s destruction, especially on Tisha B’Av. The panoramic view of the Temple site, from The Mount of Olives is amazing.

In the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Jordan occupied East Jerusalem, including the Mount of Olives, and held it until the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

Today, a Jewish group in Jerusalem is using 21st century technology to map every tombstone in the ancient cemetery.

Their goal is to photograph every grave, map it digitally, record every name, and make the information available online. This will help visitors find their way around the cemetery.

Approximately 40,000 graves have been mapped so far by the team, which began work in 2008. They expect to finish recording all of the intact gravestones—an estimated 100,000 in total—by the end of next year. The rest are either so old they are unrecognizable or lie underneath later layers of burial.

Mappers look at aerial photographs, consult handwritten burial records dating back to the mid-1800s, walk along the rows of graves and dig through piles of dislocated tombstones, noting names and dates.

“This place has been used for burial since there have been signs of life in Jerusalem,” said Moti Shamis, a member of the mapping team.

The mappers are from an organization called Elad, affiliated with the settlement movement, which also works to move Jews into east Jerusalem in an attempt to prevent the city’s division in any future peace deal.

Elad has made it its business to develop sites of Jewish importance in east Jerusalem, reinforcing the Israeli presence in the part of the city the Palestinians want as their capital.

Jews began burying their dead on the Mount of Olives about three millennia ago. It was a convenient site, a short walk from the city walls. The is a sought-after place to be buried for Jews in Israel and abroad.

Among the oldest graves that still bear names is one of a medieval scholar, Ovadia of Bartenura; it’s over 500 years old. The work of the mappers has solved several mysteries, one of them that of the missing grave of Shmuel Ben-Bassat.

Ben-Bassat was a soldier who died in combat in the war that surrounded Israel’s creation in 1948. He was buried on January 14th of that year, before Jewish forces lost the cemetery, along with the rest of east Jerusalem, to the Jordanian army.

For the next 19 years Jordan controlled the cemetery, paving over part of it to build a road, using gravestones to pave paths in a nearby military camp and abandoning the rest to disrepair. When Israel recaptured the Mount of Olives, the soldier’s family could find no trace of him.

Going through old burial records as part of the new project, the mapping team discovered a note saying he had been interred “next to Gader Gurjis and in front of Deborah, the widow of Reuven Mirabi.” Those graves are still recognizable and Ben-Bassat now has a military gravestone.

Elsewhere in the cemetery lies Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a national hero. He was buried there in 1922. Nearby is Menahem Begin, buried in 1992 in a modest grave that makes no mention of the fact that he was Israel’s prime minister.

Begin requested burial there, rather than in the country’s national cemetery alongside other Israeli leaders, because he wanted to be close to two fighting comrades who died in 1947.

The Mount of Olives is undoubtedly important to the Jewish people. It is a place that needs to be under Israeli control.