How was the album Born and Created?

The adages “History repeats itself” and “There is nothing new under the sun” have been well-known for many years and we often wonder how a newspaper headline from a thousand or two thousand years ago would look when recounting events as they occurred in real time, which today are called “historical” or “revolutionary.” How would these events appear to a contemporary journalist? How would they look as a lively, colorful and journalistic report from the field rather than as an historical analysis of these events? This is how the idea for an historical news album arose -- out of curiosity and desire for a different kind of historical documentation: light, readable, sensational, something of the moment. The stories are worded as newspaper accounts and the design is in newspaper-like, although it is more colorful and richer in pictures and illustrations. The public likes to read headlines and to live the pictures.

The historical news album has quite a few headlines that would not “embarrass” a modern day tabloid newspaper, for example:

Arabs Destroy Holy Monasteries (page 64)
Earthquake Rocks Bethlehem (page 71)
Women Join Crusades (page 98)
Want to Be a Pilgrim? Show me the Money! (page 133)
Napoleon: "At the Gates of Acre, My Luck Ran Out." (page 167)

The descriptions are so alive that it seems to the reader that he is actually living the period, fighting the Crusader ranks, becoming energized and excited from the journey to the Holy Land and the encounter with the historic and holy places.

The colorful figures, who seem to have had life breathed into them by the new historical album’s creators, come alive and the reader finds himself alongside them struggling with the difficulties that they encounter along the way, tumbling into the midst of their adventures, fighting alongside them in the religious wars, identifying with the enthusiasm gripping the pilgrims as they view the holy places with their own eyes and together with them staring wonderingly at the inhabitants of the Holy Land, and examining their exotic customs.

The writing of the news album required historical research and the perusal of dozens of scholarly articles on the subject of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, ancient manuscripts, and primarily the testimony left behind by pilgrims who arrived to the Holy Land during the years that have passed since the crucifixion of Jesus and his ascension to heaven. A decision was made that the book would be based principally on the testimonies of the pilgrims, and to their testimonies would be added historical accounts that would exemplify the various periods. In order to do this, we asked researchers, some of them doctoral candidates in history, to search through history books and rummage through ancient manuscript collections, archives, universities and libraries around the world in order to assemble from them the most interesting testimonies, events, stories, illustrations and pictures relting to the subject of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. After determining the criteria for the news items to be inserted into the album, the work was divided up among various writers, and the scope and size of the article for each important historical news item was determined. The team worked just like the editorial team of a popular daily newspaper when they met to decide what would go in and what scale of story would be published. Sometimes a description of an event that originally appeared as a research paper, or even as a complete book, became in the final analysis, a half page article.

When the writing of the shortened article was complete, as mentioned above, the work was submitted to a professional journalist who was responsible for editing the items just like newspapers articles (as if the articles were being written at the time the event actually occurred). An appropriate and sometimes even sensationalist headline was assigned to the article. “One picture is worth a thousand words” – a picture is a very important part of a newspaper article which often makes the item substantive and authentic and this is the way we related to the pictures in the articles. However, when it is a matter of historical news items, it is not always possible to get a picture from the time of the event itself – although it is surprising in how many instances we did succeed in attaching to the story a picture or illustration from the same period – but we did make up the missing pieces with other spectacular pictures related to the incident, place or period.

The work of locating appropriate illustrations was the hardest part of the work on the historical news album. In order to gather the material and the pictures we used material taken from hundreds of private and public archives and ancient manuscripts in some of the most renowned international libraries in the world. In addition to historical pictures and illustrations that were gathered up from ancient manuscripts, photographers were sent to photograph sites in which the various events took place and hundreds of pictures were purchased from the archives of a variety of photographers. Historians, heads of the various church denominations and professionals from the publishing industry expressed their enthusiasm with the finished product and with this innovative and unique historical news album, which enables each and every one to find in the album stories written in a fascinating, succinct and enjoyable style

In conclusion: This historical news album’s greatest advantage is that it serves as a time tunnel and it succeeds in demonstrating to the readers the history that until today we only knew from simple reading in the history books – into a living and enthralling report and an ongoing adventure over 2000 years old .

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