The New Jerusalem/El-HEJERA Project .
3. Benefits - Community building and the welfare of
Jerusalem
Apart from the global benefits discussed in the introduction, the project will yield personal benefits to the participants, and local benefits to the residents of the Old City of Jerusalem.
An orientation towards, and a pilgrimage to, Jerusalem can serve people's individuation and their groping towards transformation into a larger and more significant identity. It can be during, or through, this pilgrimage-as-personal-transformation that people would also enter into new associations to heal themselves and the world around them (See appendices “G” and “H”).
Progressing in the proposed virtual model of Jerusalem will entail distant “E-Learning” of religious and spiritual matters, and will exercise in interpersonal understandings and in team working. These will therefore form multi-faith curriculums of spiritual progress in the Jerusalem settings, and the model may be open to appropriate religious organizations to add their teachings and information.
The Jerusalem contents will include also opportunities and demand obligations for social service to the residents of the Old City of Jerusalem – which at present is a depressed area with very poor social services and amenities. The project will thus offer Jerusalem’s poor a new resource of volunteer assistance and charity.
We shall develop several pilot volunteer projects and offer them among the tasks of the program. (Presently 2 such projects are explored: (1) Cleaning a neglected plot belonging to the Greek Patriarchy which has become a garbage dump and turning it to a recreation place for the local neighbors, (2) Making the existing Internet venues (1 in the Jewish, 1 in the Moslem and 1 in the Christian Quarters) serving the tourists also serve the local children and train them in Internet, and “pushing” the New Jerusalem/El-HEJERA programs to both tourists and locals).