Trashopolis S02 E02: Jerusalem

Jerusalem a city revered by so many different faiths even its garbage stirs up controversy that people who live off garbage to them still don't live normally from modern dumps to ancient landfills Jerusalem's garbage tells its history survives base and may even shape its future [Music] [Applause] [Music] Jerusalem the eternal holy city to the Jews it's the sacred ground on which King Solomon built the temple to house the ten commandments to the Christians it is the place where Jesus was crucified and to Muslims it's the site of the Prophet Muhammad's ascent to heaven pilgrims of many faiths flocked to Jerusalem as they did in ancient times but now they come by the busload a number over two million a year and although their quest is spiritual the garbage they leave behind is without a doubt material [Music] Jerusalem is one of the world's oldest cities it was settled over 4,500 years ago and by the time of Christ more than 60,000 people lived inside the city's walls making it the most densely populated city in the world historian er mehron jerusalem was one of the most beautiful cities in the world hundreds of thousands of Jews pilgrims would flock into Jerusalem during the great three festivities of the year they would come to Jerusalem and would make a mess in the city a bloody mess Jewish pilgrims came here to sacrifice Bulls sheep and goats at their temple animal sacrifice was believed to be a way to serve God it was so common the Jerusalem streets were soaked with blood and the stench of carcasses filled the city [Music] a lot of sacrifice blood bones all this would be all these would be were the remains of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem they needed some way to get rid of this but where all of that gruesome garbage went was a mystery until now archaeologist Ronnie Reich believes he's found where they dumped it just when we climb look oh this is ancient garbage yeah I mean endless in 1995 while working in the Kidron Valley just outside Jerusalem's fall city walls Brian and colleagues found thousands of pieces of broken pottery and ancient animal bones they hit the jackpot then we discovered this cut here which is an artificial cut through the hill because a water pipe a sewer is damaged up there water started to cut in the last 10 or maybe more years into the hill washing out debris for Reich this ancient garbage pit was a gold mine he estimates that the dump held a total of 300,000 tons of refuse and I said we took out here two truckloads 20 cubic meters the quantity of garbage convinced rike that they discovered an ancient official city dump we can tell by the garbage where it comes from for example greater part of it comes from private houses and private houses we're on the western part of the city a kilometer away I have to imagine that such an amount several hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of this garbage was probably gathered by by the municipality of Jerusalem of those days but Reich wasn't sure exactly when the trash was dumped until he made a lucky find right these are straight coins people lost them these coins date the dumping exactly on the year these coins here come from the coins minted by Agrippa the first in his six here in the forties of the first century Common Era the coins did the dump to the time of Christ and there were other clues to the city's past right found thousands of animal bones all kosher not a pig bone among them there's a large number of animal bones which are young usually you don't slaughter no other places young animals it's too expensive to do it right right determined the young animals were offerings to God and since Jewish law requires sacrificial remains to be buried far from living quarters reich surmised the bones came from the temple part of these animals are the dump of the Temple Mount right because on the altar in the temple you would have sacrificed perfect young animals so this in a way reflects the holy city rikes find is one of the oldest excavated garbage dumps in the world and confirms that animal sacrifice has been part of Jerusalem's history for thousands of years [Music] the Old Testament records one of the first instances when God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of faith at the last moment God spares Isaac and Abraham sacrifices a sheep instead a similar story is told in the Quran I did level he let it set up the Prophet Abraham peace be upon him was instructed in a dream to slaughter his son he obeyed God but while he was getting ready to slaughter his son God sent him a sheep to sacrifice instead what this story teaches us is to obey God the way the Prophet Abraham did it it's a ritual unchanged for thousands of years during the holiday of Eid al-adha Muslims go to the mosque to pray in the morning [Music] the men visit a butcher to select a suitable offering [Music] Pleasanton for Akane over chicken fish opee a castle more of the conserve mill me to make the sacrifice as humane as possible it's done with a sharp knife and a swift cut sakina's pull mother here then we're ganna Sakina attack directly after the sacrifice the animal is butchered the family keeps one portion distributes another to friends and relatives and gives the rest to the poor and as in ancient times leftovers end up in the trash [Music] Jews Christians and Muslims swarm the religious sites bringing prayers and offerings and leaving a trail of garbage that's anything but holy it's been like this since biblical times and back then garbage meant a lot more than plain refuse it also included corpses historian a old Mehran in ancient Judaism the dead is the worst uncleanness you can imagine so dead people tombs cemeteries were taken out as far as possible from the city walls so dead people garbage is as far as I understand the the thinking of the people of that time we're not so far from each other unlike today of course the dump was just outside the city of David the oldest part of Jerusalem in the valley of been Henan historical records describe it as a place of unspeakable filth where the stench of rotting bodies and the smoke of sulfur fires produced an odour of death many scholars believe that this ancient garbage dump influenced our concept of Hell there are two palm trees in the valley of been Hinnom in between them you will see smoke ascending and this is the mouth of hell refuse would be brought out of the city through the dung gate a fitting name still in use today but now the dung gate leads to one of Jerusalem's most important religious sites the site bears many names and has different meanings for Jews Christians and Muslims Jews and Christians call it the Temple Mount the holiest place in Judaism where the Ark of the Covenant containing the Ten Commandments is believed to have stood at the center of the first temple the Jewish temple was destroyed twice the last time by the Romans in 70 AD and six centuries later the Muslims built a mosque and shrine some say on top of the rubble of the temple for all three faiths it's sacred ground the Temple Mount is the most important archaeological site in this country nevertheless the Temple Mount was never excavated that is for political reasons the Temple Mount is actually unknown to us but archaeologist Gabriel barkay believes that he has the key that can unlock some of the temple mount's mysteries and it arrived in a pile of trash in the winter of 2000 two of my students appeared at my place in Jerusalem and emptied some plastic bags onto the nice dining table we have they were full with mud and with dirt and it was mainly pottery that they collected from these heaps of dumped material they told me that this from the dumps of the Temple Mount Barca was shocked to learn how this priceless trash ended up on his kitchen table in November 1999 renovations were underway at one of the mosques near the Dome of the rock but no archaeologist was present at the construction site and truckloads of excavation rubble were hauled to a dump site outside the city walls into the Kidron Valley approximately 400 truckloads of soil saturated with the history of the Temple Mount in history of Jerusalem were removed from the Temple Mount and dumped the controversial dump was about half a kilometer east of the Temple Mount and over there they've got mixed with modern garbage part of the material was really dumped into the modern urban garbage heaps of Jerusalem thousands of years of precious artifacts from one of the holiest sites in the world for Jews Muslims and Christians were treated as trash the Temple Mount is a place for which excavating it with a toothbrush would be too large a tool and they did it with bulldozers it took years of legal wrangling to get permission to rescue the rubble now thousands of treasures are being sorted and carefully catalogued by an army of volunteers we have had until now more than 65,000 volunteers which make this project to be the most exposed archaeological project to the wider public of course they cannot destroy anything here everything is already destroyed they don't need any experience what they need is goodwill and a pair of eyes that's all nice peace is laid Roman coin second century most probably second third century it's a nice coin you can see the outline of a head already emerging a head of ruler a nice piece we have enormous number of coins the coins are from the very beginning of coinage we have I think the best collection ever found of silver coins of the Crusaders which were minted in Jerusalem those coins go on and on [Music] volunteers have identified thousands of valuable pieces from tools and weapons to coins household pottery and tiles from every era we have jewelry we have collections of slingshots arrowheads bullets of the Turkish Ottoman period from the 17th 18th centuries we have even a flintlock of a musket of the 18th century so altogether we have amazing collections of objects we have tens of thousands of objects those objects cover more than 10,000 years of history just for example to show you some representation of the finds we have we have here a collection of flooring tiles dating back to the early Roman period 1st century BC time of Herod the Great barkay has found items from the Muslim era as well like these from the 16th century which replaced the nine hundred year old originals from the Dome of the rock through trash barkay and his team are unraveling the mysteries of Jerusalem's past [Music] every day thousands of pilgrims and tourists swarm Jerusalem's holy sites and given the mountains of trash they generate the city needs a modern army of garbage collectors to keep the holy sites clean they start early every morning before the crowds come and work well into the night after the holy sites have closed Jerusalem produces over 1200 tons of trash a day and twice as much during the religious holidays to keep a lid on it a thousand garbage men sweep shovel and wrestle the garbage into containers so trucks can make it disappear before dawn when a new wave of pilgrims arrives like here at the western wall for Jews this is one of the holiest places on earth it is believed to be a section of the original retaining wall of the second Jewish temple according to biblical descriptions the temple was spectacular an architectural jewel it was the nucleus of the Jewish world but when the Romans tore it down in 70 AD only this wall was left standing and the troubles didn't end there for centuries enemies of the Jews continued to defile the site with trash when the Ottomans conquered this city in 1516 the often governor used to live right by the present-day prayer Plaza where Jews pray today and right by his palace there was a pile a huge pile of Earth and garbage and one day he sees an old lady carrying her garbage and throwing it down right at his window he was quite offended by this so the governor asked her to explain what she did and she tells him that this is the precise place of the holy site of the Temple of the Jews and that she and her family and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem are defining the site hearing that the governor ordered the site to be cleaned and gave it over to the Jews as a prayer site till this day [Music] the faithful pray here three times a day every day [Music] and on mondays and thursdays families from all over the world descend on the wall to celebrate ball and bat mitzvahs a coming-of-age ceremony when boys and girls reached the age of 13 it's considered a great Mitzvah or blessing to read a portion of the Torah the Hebrew Bible next to the law it happens more than a hundred times a week and there's always garbage left behind [Music] imagine you coming over here trying to do a bar mitzvah so you bring your friends with you so you bring food over so there is lots of mass here chairs tables lots of garbage workers are always on duty to pick up litter even though most of the faithful are respectful enough to take their garbage with them if you would come here and you are where you think that Judaism would grow up so if you see garbage on the floor I don't think there is chance that you won't pick it up [Music] [Applause] eight million people visit the wall each year and many come especially to leave behind handwritten prayers find like a small crack a secret place to put the notes inside so no one will take it out because they want that the wishes will stay there prayers may be left in the wall for months and while those millions of bits of paper are not garbage they have to be cleared away just the same workers only remove them twice a year and very gently and we just take him like that or or either collect them handily way and put them in the back that's it we use it in your hands because we appreciate the wall it's really holy for us we don't want the damage to damage the wall it's been damaged all of those two thousand years after they take off their nose they take him put them in bags and bury them next to a cemetery because it's holy and we don't know what's inside while workers prepare the western wall for the next wave of prayers it's also getting busy at Christianity's most holy site the Church of the Holy Sepulchre [Music] many believe this is what Jesus was buried and resurrected after the crucifixion last year the church had over 2 million visitors some tourists but many true pilgrims and father Clark welcomes them all well first of all tourists who want to come to see the way things were 2,000 years ago and that's all as if they went to a museum but a pilgrim comes to pray and to see how things are today with Jesus risen from the dead among us so a pilgrim comes for prayer a tourist comes to see and to leave but whether they come to tour or to pray the challenge of cleaning up after them is the same six different Christian denominations manage the church and its cleaning chores it makes for a complicated schedule naturally if you've got six families sharing the same kitchen at home you're going to need guidelines and boundaries and we do have those guidelines and boundaries that is that on a Friday morning one of the three major groups has the responsibility of cleaning the tool and also maintaining a clean during the week a breach in the schedule can result in fist fights between priests so it's best not to tamper with it today for the Armenians next week it will be hot are called the Latin Catholics the Roman Catholics and defense iskcon's the following week two Greek Orthodox and then once again it goes back to the Armenians again the following week as they do at the Western Wall pilgrims here tucked prayers into the cracks and they too must be carefully removed well if you'd saw the numbers of people who come in here for example and during the high season we could have up to 10,000 people per day you will see that the what they're carrying on their feet alone needs some kind of special cleaning it's just not going to be whatever you use in your kitchen today surprisingly they found that gasoline is an excellent solvent the best for handling the really tough jobs the leftover residue is soaked up with sawdust and swept away so it's also very good for cleaning away the wax because we use a lot of candles inside and so does need for something very strong to clean the flooring fortunately the gasoline is never ignited and other than the odd fistfight the various denominations managed to get along and keep the church clean [Music] with religious sites on almost every street corner this is one of the holiest cities in the world but keeping the entire city clean is complicated Jerusalem is so sacred to Muslims Christians and Jews that even its trash can be a source of tension every day 1,300 tons of garbage is hauled outside the city walls and beyond the Green Line a strictly enforced divide between Israel and Palestinian territories it's a ten kilometer trip to the sprawling a Buddhist landfill [Music] where the holy city's trash is dumped sorted and compacted [Music] the dump was originally located a few kilometers away but it was moved to accommodate a new Israeli settlement now it's on Palestinian land nitzan Levi supervises the landfill this site was supposed to be closed down and it stays open because the Palestinians are disposing their waste here so they don't have any alternative if they had a place this place would be closed here ago Jerusalem city workers bring the garbage from the city to the dump but most of the workers on the ground who sift and sort the trash are Bedouins the Bedouins have long been the symbol of life in the harsh desert their nomadic Society predates the birth of Christ but today the territorial disputes between Israelis and Palestinians have forced them to settle around the dump slo-mo lacquer is a lawyer who represents the Bedouins they don't have a real option but they are not really accepted by the Palestinians who reside in their towns nearby actually the Palestinians really don't want them there and their bodies don't have the option to move there they cannot buy houses there they cannot buy land there and they don't have another option [Applause] many still live in shacks and makeshift villages their employment options are extremely limited the contractor here is trying to organize it properly and they hired by them and he paid them in order to build job those lucky enough to land a job with Israeli contractors earn a salary they also do good business on the side selling materials to local scrap yards Morimoto Baba's area but for female victim the whole battle [Music] for many other Bedouins life is not as good they're the ones without an official job at the dump they come when night falls and live off what they scavenge [Music] they enter illegally there were two or three cases that were shot by guards of the garbage and they collect garbage and they tried to sell it wherever they can I don't think that's very normal way of living for for these people [Music] but illegal or not until the territorial conflicts are resolved they have nowhere else to go the dump has become a temporary home [Music] not all of Jerusalem's garbage problems are so difficult to solve one initiative the city is proud of deals with pesky water bottles that pilgrims throw away by the millions they used to go straight to the dump not anymore a bottle deposit law encourages producers of 1.5 liter bottles to voluntarily recycle their plastic since the law was introduced over 90 million bottles have been collected and recycled many of them end up here in the water bottle collection cage is installed all over the city but on some of Jerusalem's streets just getting to those cages is a battle what you will see now if you look at the cage right now you will see car that blocking my cage now we try to mover it it depends if I can open because if I can open a towel over it if not I prefer to leave it like this and the bottles are picked up everyday with massive high-powered vacuums once they're picked up the bottles are delivered to a facility to be recycled for this worker it's not just a job it's a calling you know we saved 400 tons it very R 400 tons of these bottles it's 400 ton of garbage you understand what I mean that's the beautiful thing to do when I'm doing it it's not only my work I'm thinking about all the garbage that I'm saving to this city and to this country making recycling but I think it's a Jerusalem is changing its thinking about garbage and it's not just the city taking the lead many waste production initiatives began with individual families and neighborhoods as Matt and her family began embracing an environmentally-friendly lifestyle when they realized that half of the garbage they generated was organic so they decided to start composting I'm making the hole in the hot compost it's very very hot and whose we put the organic matter from our organic waste now I just put it on back booooo it inside we put some water because who you want to be moisturizing microbes could do their work and after this is clean we can take it back home and use it again above all I put some dry dry matter that we get from the municipality of Jerusalem and now there's no smell and it's very neat and everything inside it will be compost like this we have here another composter this is just invest for a few months and we can see that this this was once our organic waste this is not organic this was once maybe a few months ago our organic waste and it just turned into great great great compost and we can use it for our garden you don't have to live in a with a big garden to make compost you can do contests in in the city it wasn't long before they realized there wasn't much left to throw out and they tried to convince others to join the cause so we went to the municipality and we told people there about our initiative about our project our idea and they listened and they said okay go ahead try and if it would be good so we will join you [Music] the city has responded to the grassroots movement with green initiatives like this recycling center designed to attract families and the next generation of recyclers [Music] but these days jerusalem faces a much bigger environmental challenge over the centuries Jews Christians and Muslims have fought over control of Jerusalem's sacred sites and sometimes even its trash but despite their differences all share a common need in a city surrounded by desert water is life that's why the founders of the city chose this site Shahar Shiloh is an expert guide basically the ancient city during the time of the Canaanites which is approximately four thousand years ago was built around the Jihan spring it's a huge spring supporting approximately 5000 cubic litres of water every day and around that place they built a fortress and around it start at the city itself according to the Bible Jerusalem's sole source of water in ancient times was this single spring the Gihon spring located just outside the city walls and in times of war Jerusalem's only source of water was at risk but in 701 BC a clever king hatched an ingenious plan to protect the city's water supply it is said that King ezekiah ordered two crews to dig a secret tunnel one starting from the source of the spring the other from the heart of the city the workers inched their way through solid rock and eventually met in the middle thanks to his ekia the city's water was secure for centuries the story of Hezekiah's tunnel was thought to be a myth but in 1838 the actual tunnel was discovered complete with an ancient inscription that confirmed the Bible story [Music] Hezekiah's tunnel is dark narrow and over 500 meters long and just how those tunnelers pulled it off is still a mystery so I must say the riddle is still quite a huge riddle but we do have an inscription that tells us exactly what happened here two groups working one against the other with axes and chisels and hammers and they listened to one another which means no King must have been the system of connecting inside the stone itself [Music] the tunnel connects the Gihon spring to the Silom pool inside the city walls it's here the Bible says Jesus told the blind man to wash and restored his sight water from the pool sustained the city and played a key role in religious rituals then as now water cuts across all religious divisions everyone gets thirsty regardless of faith [Music] but water also has a long connection with spiritual cleanliness both Jews and Muslims practice a ritual cleansing before praying and eating one of the most important sacraments in the Christian faith is the washing away of sins and rebirth through baptism the ceremony has its roots in the baptism of Christ a ritual performed by Jesus's cousin John the Baptist [Music] the source of the holy water for baptism in Jerusalem is the Jordan River the jordan connects the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel to the Dead Sea over 160 kilometers south but the river has seen better days sewage and the runoff from agricultural land now threatened the once-mighty Jordan the whole Jordan easing danger and he's quite polluted it's also getting dry very dry it's so bad the government had to shut down baptism sites near Jerusalem for fear of pilgrims getting sick so the pilgrims go north more than 150 kilometres from Jerusalem where the water is cleaner every year more than 600,000 people visit the ordinates site near the Sea of Galilee Graziella cap shook is the site's marketing director it's not only the question of getting baptized the question is also touching the holy water coming to the place and and a lot of people in groups are coming to pray here and together here here a dam allows fresh water from the Sea of Galilee into the river and the water quality is tested regularly a blessing for the thousands of pilgrims [Music] they're coming from all over the world those are people who are saving all their life to come to to the holiday and to Israel I think that it's every time very emotional to see the ceremony and the emotion of the people who come to the Jordan River to get baptized it's it's unique [Music] [Music] water in both ancient and modern Jerusalem has its spiritual and ritualistic uses but it's always been used for more earthly reasons as well like visiting the privy even as far back as 700 BC the rich had its soft historian he all may Ron we have one Jewish source from a later period which relates to the issue of toilet seats and it says how would you recognize a wealthy person it's the one who has a toilet next to his table now I wouldn't take this too literally but the basic idea is that most people who have would have to go outside the city walls to do what they need to do while these wealthy people had these facilities at hand near their houses interestingly enough from the excavations underneath these toilets we are usually being able to explore the diet illnesses that people suffered from and much more information about the daily life of ancient Jerusalem heights recently archaeologists found an ancient public outhouse just beyond the old city walls the idea was that once the CETA finished his business in the latrine here there would be a stick with a sponge on it the Roman equivalent of modern toilet paper he would clean himself and then put it back over here for the next customer to come but the story behind the toilet seats is the real surprise we tend to think that we invented green thinking recycling and everything but actually the Romans were great recyclers 2,000 years ago and these are Roman theater seats which were taken away and incorporated within the Roman latrine later so the ancient Roman theater seats had new life inside a later Roman latrine and best of all you didn't have to remember to flush gravity took care of it you have to remember that we are standing on a slope so basically whatever refuse you had in Jerusalem you could get rid of it by flushing it down the slope in the underground down to the area of the Kidron Valley and the former site of Jerusalem it all still flows downhill but now people live down in the valley and most of them don't have modern sanitation Jerusalem deputy mayor Naomi sir in the late 90s the Israeli government took the pipe underground for a great stretch of the valley and that had it a rather sad result because those that built there illegally could not be linked up to the sewage because they were building illegally so once again you had sewage in the streets which i think is a very sad place that we all have to get out of located just outside the old city walls the silwan district is controlled by the Israelis and because most of the Palestinian houses were built illegally they've been cut off from Jerusalem sewer system as a result untreated sewage flows down the Kedron Valley and had straight into the Dead Sea over 30 kilometres away it's a situation the city of Jerusalem seems determined to resolve and we must remember that sewage knows no boundaries so in the kidron Israeli and Palestinian got a sewage meet and flow together down into the Dead Sea that level of couple of cooperations exists and we are now trying to take this a step further the city's plan for the valley includes legalizing most of the Palestinian houses connecting them to Jerusalem's main sewer line and preserving public green spaces it's an ambitious goal seems really impossible to achieve at the moment but I don't think that has to deter us and I always remember what Martin Luther King said which should be a lesson to the environmental movement he said I have a dream now if he'd got up and said I have a nightmare which he had then we'd have you know we deserve poor Martin Luther King has got a nightmare we've all got nightmares but the great thing in this situation is to put your nightmare aside and transmit the dream and get it to catch on for the restoration of the Kedron valley to succeed all the stakeholders must work together it's an uphill battle but one worth fighting the beauty of the Kidron Valley if we could restore it we could bring prosperity to the region and we've set the goal and we're going to try and achieve it [Music] [Applause] Jerusalem the holy city is now a modern metropolis with modern garbage problems to solve them a new dialogue is underway trash may help bring people together and inspire them to find peaceful solutions in the meantime the garbage collectors will continue to navigate the city's ancient and narrow streets picking up pilgrims trash one load at a time [Music]

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Id: nt1oorwSvU0

Length: 45min 31sec (2731 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2018