…ough the Desert to the Holy Land

… J. Merritt, Rabbi of the Washington Avenue Temple

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Transcribed from the clipping

treated with the utmost kindness and cordiality. These Bedouins live in tents made of black goats hair, which is spun and woven by the women into strips of coarse cloth about twenty inches in width and perfectly water proof. Several of such lengths are then sown together to make a tent. Each tent requires at least nine poles, placed in rows of three.

The shiek of the village usually has a large tent, never less than twenty feet long. This is divided near the center pole into two apartments. That on the right is called the “mehram” or woman’s apartment and into this no men strangers are admitted under any circumstances.

On the arrival of male guests, a cloth is immediately drawn across the woman’s apartment and they must remain out of sight. This explains the incident of Sorah when the angels visited Abraham to fortell the birth of Issac. You will remember they said, “Where is Sarah, thy wife?”

And he said, “Behold, in the tent.” that is in the woman’s apartment where she might hear but not be seen of her husband’s guests. Coming from houses crowded with furniture, the Bedouin tent offers a striking, but I will not say a refreshing contrast. It is hard to conceive such bareness.

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Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

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Date check: No masthead and no date line appear anywhere on this scan. The slide date of 1913-06-22 cannot be confirmed or contradicted from the image.

Cite this clipping

"…ough the Desert to the Holy Land," Evansville Courier & Press, 22 June 1913. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1913-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1913-003