Shmuel HaNavi Street

The Tomb of Samuel, which rests atop the tallest mountain outside the Jerusalem city limits, can be reached by following the continuation of Shmuel HaNavi Street northward.

[3][4] Its location beyond populated areas such as Mea Shearim and Beit Yisrael was the reason why Simcha Mandelbaum, a Jewish merchant who had raised his family in the Old City, decided to build a new home at the eastern end of the street in 1927.

[9] The 1949 Armistice Agreements put Shmuel HaNavi Street parallel to the Jordanian border, with a no man's land of barbed wire and minefields separating it from Ammunition Hill to the north.

[10][11] From 1949 to 1967 the official crossing point between Israeli- and Jordanian-held territory stood at the eastern end of Shmuel HaNavi Street at a checkpoint called the Mandelbaum Gate.

[6][12] Clergy, diplomats and United Nations personnel used the 50 yards (46 m)[13] gateway to pass through the concrete and barbed wire barrier between the sectors, but Jordanian officials allowed only one-way passage for non-official traffic.

Today a sundial standing in the middle of the Jerusalem Light Rail tracks near the beginning of Shmuel HaNavi Street marks the site where the Gate once stood.

[15][16] To reinforce its claim on the territory on its side of the 1949 armistice line, in the early 1960s[17] the Jerusalem municipality erected a complex of "long train" tenement buildings built in the manner of fortresses.

[28] In 2004 a suicide bomber dressed as a Haredi Jew boarded a crowded #2 bus on its return route from the Western Wall and detonated himself as it turned the corner to Shmuel HaNavi Street.

The quarter-acre (one-dunam) area was thought to be part of a larger network of quarries extending from Musrara to Sanhedria, from which the giant stones used by King Herod in the construction of the Second Temple (first century BC) were hewn.