Women of Jerusalem: A Clue Game Tour of the Old City

Which women might you meet?

Each tour introduces 9 women, chosen for your group according to background, interests, the weather and the time available. They come from every period and faith, from the First Temple to modern Israel.

• Golda Meir: the Jerusalem years that reveal the young mother behind Israel's future prime minister, and what she did to save the country in the War of Independence.
• Huldah the Prophetess: the woman Jerusalem's royal court consulted during a national religious crisis.
• Bobe Kreshe Berman: an unexpected granny businesswoman whose venture you probably saw today.
• Julia Berenice: a Jewish queen caught between Jerusalem, Rome and one of history's most controversial men.
• Franzisca Baruch: the woman who influenced how modern Israel looks, and supported herself by making marzipan.
• Mary Magdalene: a story that begins in the Gospels and expands to rumors, popes, books and movies.
• Shlomtzion HaMalka (Salome Alexandra): Judea's queen who brought prosperity to the land, with wheat as large as kidneys, barley the size of olive pits and lentils like gold coins.
• Anna the Prophetess: a brief appearance in the Gospel of Luke, at a decisive moment in the Jerusalem Temple.
• Esther Cailingold: a short life that places a young British woman inside the battle for Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter in 1948.
• Mariamne the Hasmonean: royal ambition, obsession and deadly family politics in the Jerusalem of Herod the Great.
• Rabi'a al Adawiyya: a link between Jerusalem and a powerful teaching about divine love in Sufi Islam.
• Judith Montefiore: a Lady who shared far more of Jerusalem's story than the city remembers.
• Empress Helena: imperial Rome, the Holy Sepulchre and a mystery that historians still debate.
• Saint Pelagia: a Jerusalem tradition that leads to a Mount of Olives tomb, cross-dressing and a startling question of identity.
• Sister Liliosa Fasching: a Christian nun, a dying king, a shell that exploded in the garden and 52 years guarding Jerusalem's Austrian Hospice.
• Empress Aelia Eudocia: imperial power, poetry and an independent mind in Byzantine Jerusalem.

More on this: I wrote about how this tour began, in The Times of Israel.

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