The Ultra-Holy City

With their numbers and their political clout growing, the ultra-Orthodox aren't just changing the makeup of Jerusalem. They are altering Israel's national identity

Oded Balilty / AP for TIME

Ultra Orthodox Jews attend the funeral of Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv in Jerusalem, Wednesday, July 18, 2012. Elyashiv, revered by Jews worldwide as the top rabbinic authority of this generation for his scholarship and rulings on complex elements of Jewish law, died Wednesday, hospital officials said. He was 102.

Elhanan Gibli found God. not just in the personal-salvation sense. There was an address.

God was last known to reside approximately 300 yards north of the minimart at the corner of Ma'ale HaShalom and Wadi Hilwa. There stood the Second Temple, built around the Ark of the Covenant containing the Holy of Holies. And two millennia after the temple's destruction, the power of the divine still radiated so potently from the remaining stones that Gibli recalls feeling it in his entire being the first time he entered Jerusalem's Old City, at age 13. The welling of awe affirmed a pair of...

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