JPOST
While recent rioting in and around Jerusalem's Old City has left religious tensions between the capital's Muslims and Jews simmering, a new dispute - this time concerning the volume of prayers, more than the prayers themselves - is resonating in outlying neighborhoods.
Jewish residents of these areas, all of which are in close proximity to Arab neighborhoods in the capital's east, have begun to complain that the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, which is broadcast five times a day from loudspeakers inside local mosques, has become an intolerable nuisance, particularly when it blasts through their neighborhoods at 4 a.m. every day.
"It's as if they took the speakers and put them inside my bedroom," Yehudit Raz, a resident of the northeast Pisgat Ze'ev neighborhood, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. "And it's not from one mosque or two mosques - we're talking about tons of speakers going off, one after the other, every morning." [...]
While recent rioting in and around Jerusalem's Old City has left religious tensions between the capital's Muslims and Jews simmering, a new dispute - this time concerning the volume of prayers, more than the prayers themselves - is resonating in outlying neighborhoods.
Jewish residents of these areas, all of which are in close proximity to Arab neighborhoods in the capital's east, have begun to complain that the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, which is broadcast five times a day from loudspeakers inside local mosques, has become an intolerable nuisance, particularly when it blasts through their neighborhoods at 4 a.m. every day.
"It's as if they took the speakers and put them inside my bedroom," Yehudit Raz, a resident of the northeast Pisgat Ze'ev neighborhood, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. "And it's not from one mosque or two mosques - we're talking about tons of speakers going off, one after the other, every morning." [...]