A New Way to See Jerusalem

by Daniella Ashkenazy

A 3.5 million dollar attraction "The Time Elevator" will portray Jerusalem's 3000-year history by employing innovative state-of-the-art technology which allows the audience to feel as if they were literally part of history. Dramatic events are reenacted on movie sets, as well as in historic locations, to produce a 45-minute movie. But this movie has a new twist. Its film footage has been transferred to a special computer program and then synchronized with the audience's seats turning the experience into something closer to an amusement park ride than a run-of-the-mill multimedia show.

Seats have been hooked up to move on a six-directional axis that literally lifts the audiences' seats and whirls them through world-shaking events as the chairs skip into the air, come down with a thud, turn at an angle or shake all over, while a series of dramatic scenes is projected on three giant panoramic screens.

The 500 sq. meter 100-seat hall has been made to look like an elevator that descends into Warren's shaft one of the perpendicular shafts dug by British archeologist Sir Charles Warren in Jerusalem at the end of the 19th century, to uncover part of Jerusalem's network of underground aqueducts and tunnels.

After the audience finds itself at the bottom of Warren's shaft, the plot unravels as they visit ancient natural and man-made subterranean passageways and shafts under the Old City where, according to the script, "the past is still alive."

What follows is a series of "rides" into the past that bring the audience face-to-face with historic figures and events: prophets of doom and redemption such as Jeremiah; great leaders, from King Solomon to Emperor Constantine; religious figures, from Abraham to Jesus to Mohammed; and liberators of Jerusalem, from the Macabees to Uzi Narkis, the IDF general who commanded the Jerusalem front in 1967.

The glimpses into the past are "guided" by Shalem (Hebrew for "whole") the disputed child brought by the two mothers to King Solomon for judgment. According to the script, Shalem never died, and witnessed 3000 years of Jewish history. Shalem, who appears in each scene as a minor character on the sidelines of great events (a waiter, a bystander, etc.) is played by Chaim Topol, the Israeli actor who won international fame as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.

In one episode the audience finds itself in a marketplace in the First Temple period, witnessing a confrontation between an unbelieving King Zedekiah and the prophet Jeremiah, who speaks of doom and redemption. Participants find themselves present at the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, and follow King Zedekiah in his flight from the city. He was captured by the Babylonians, forced to watch his sons killed before his eyes, and then blinded. The audience is then treated to a wild ride providing a glimpse of the lost treasures of the First Temple filmed in the Cave of Zedekiah, in Jerusalems Old City, with animation and other special effects added to create a scene reminiscent of the film Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark. Following the course of Jewish history, the audience returns to Jerusalem with the returning exiles in the Persian period.

The script artfully mixes fact and fiction. Thus, when the "ride" brings visitors face to face with the splendor of Jerusalem in the time of Herod and the destruction of the Second Temple, the episode is shot partially on a movie set, partially at the Holy Land Hotels model of the Second Temple and partially on a Herodian street uncovered in Jerusalems Old City and other archeological sites. In one scene, Roman soldiers are filmed covering over a menorah graffiti on a wall a symbolic sign of defiance painted, according to the script, by an unidentified zealot. The menorah shown is a copy of an actual menorah scratched into the stone wall of "the burnt house" a home from the Second Temple period, uncovered by archeologists during the restoration of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem whose burnt walls testify to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

The designer of "The Time Elevator," Ori Yardeni a veteran multimedia expert who has won acclaim for his multimedia shows at the Tel Aviv Planetarium and the Eilat Marine Observatory adds that the movies historic sequences begin with Abrahams sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah; take the audience through the First and Second Temple periods; make them party to the lives of Jerusalemites under the rule of the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottoman Turks and the British; and culminate with the 1967 Six-Day War, when Jerusalem was reunited once again under Israeli sovereignty.

The attraction, which will open in August, will screen daily shows in Hebrew and English.