A story collection
Christian Zionists
They believed that the return of the Jews to their homeland would bring the coming of the Messiah closer, and some arrived here even before the first waves of immigration. Read about these Christians here.
Orde Charles Wingate
The British officer who trained the Hebrew fighters, founded the Special Night Squads, and became the father of the military doctrine of the state-in-the-making.
Alice von Battenberg
The wife of a Greek prince and mother of Prince Philip, she sheltered Jews in her home during the Holocaust and became one of the Righteous Among the Nations, buried in Jerusalem.
Elisheva Bihovsky
The non-Jewish poet who bound her fate and soul to the Jewish people and to the poet Rachel, and paid for that choice with painful loneliness and dire poverty.
Alphonse Ratisbonne
The Jewish convert, born into a wealthy banking family, who chose to devote his life to founding a church and an orphanage in Ein Kerem.
John Henry Patterson
The Protestant British officer and ardent Zionist who proudly took command of the Jewish battalions during the First World War.
Gotthilf Wagner
One of the leaders of the Templer movement, which sought to prepare the land for the coming of the Messiah, but over the years he came to openly support the Nazis.
Dr. d'Arbella
The boy born into a Chabad family in Russia who studied medicine in Egypt and became the physician to the Sultan of Zanzibar, then tried to establish a colony in the Land of Israel.
Donato Manduzio
A single nighttime vision experienced by a simple Italian farmer led an entire village to abandon Christianity, undergo circumcision, and make aliyah. The mystical, unimaginable journey of Righteous Among the Nations who became Hebrew fighters in the heart of the Galilee.
Holman Hunt
The great British painter who was enchanted by the landscapes and people of the Land of Israel, and spent many years there with his close friend, immortalizing them on canvas.
Haile Selassie
The last Ethiopian emperor’s flight to Jerusalem is a fascinating chapter of history linking Addis Ababa and the Holy City.
Princess Jeanne Merkus
One was a writer and lover of Moshe Dayan, while the other was called the Dutch Joan of Arc, and their lives ran parallel
Consul Finn
The third British consul in Jerusalem and one of the city's most prominent figures, he worked alongside his wife to protect its Jewish residents and provide them with continuous assistance.
Yelizaveta Feodorovna
A Russian princess murdered by the Bolsheviks, whose last wish brought her to her eternal rest on the slopes of Jerusalem's Mount of Olives.
Lawrence Oliphant and Alice
The British MP and his aristocratic wife, who fell in love with the land, helped the settlers and tied their fate to Naftali Herz Imber, the author of "Hatikvah"
Melania Karlovna
The Christian noblewoman who crossed every social boundary when she chose to marry the poet Shaul Tchernichovsky.
Maria Rosetta Shapira (Miriam Harry)
The daughter of Moses Wilhelm Shapira, she wrote under the pen name Miriam Harry and described her childhood in the Old City of Jerusalem in her work.
Moses Wilhelm Shapira
The Jerusalem antiquities dealer who stirred the world with his discoveries and left behind an eternal mystery: was his greatest forgery actually genuine?
Selma Lagerlöf
The renowned Swedish author of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, whose journeys and special connections with the Land of Israel deeply influenced her.
Franz van der Horn
The "strange" Dutchman who arrived in the Land of Israel on foot, fought at Tel Hai, drained swamps and carved a path to the Iyon Stream waterfalls - and whose mother was discovered to have been born Jewish only decades after his death.
Konrad Schick
From a humble cuckoo-clock maker in Germany to a leading architect and archaeologist who transformed the appearance of Jerusalem beyond its walls.
Clorinda Minor
A leader of a Christian sect who believed that the coming of Jesus was bound up with the Jews' return to the Land of Israel, and her connection to a writer and a famous story
Richard Meinertzhagen
The brilliant, flamboyant British intelligence officer serving under General Allenby, who outwitted the Turks with ingenious deception operations during the campaign to conquer Palestine.
Shota Rustaveli
Georgia's national poet, who admired Queen Tamar and found refuge and his final resting place at the Monastery of the Cross in Jerusalem.