Prayers4Peace: The Future of Jerusalem
By: Tess Miller, Global Outreach Coordinator at Ir Amim
This piece was written in July of 2025.
I’m writing this from Jerusalem at a time of immense grief. The atrocities unfolding in Gaza are beyond comprehension; every word I write feels darkened by them.
Although a part of me feels hesitant to even momentarily center myself in the face of such overwhelming Palestinian suffering, I share my story in the hope that my journey of unlearning and relearning Jerusalem is perhaps one that some readers might be able to relate to.
My name is Tess Miller. Today, I work for a Jerusalem-based human rights NGO, but nothing in my upbringing pointed me toward this path. I was raised in New Jersey, in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish home—my father a rabbi, my mother a seamstress and teacher.
Religious education shaped nearly every part of my world, including my understanding of what a Jewish homeland meant. In our community, when it came to what we called “The Holy Land” (eretz hakodesh), we didn’t really use the word “Zionism.” Connection to the land wasn’t framed as politics but as faith. Jerusalem was the heart of our prayers, a symbol of spiritual return after generations of exile.
But that education gave me little sense of the millions of others—Christians, Muslims, and native Palestinians—who also carry deep, personal connections to this city. I was taught to nurture my own love for the land as the symbol of my own people’s hope in exile. This way of understanding the land—as a sacred inheritance belonging solely to Jews—left little room for the millions of others who also call this place home. It erased not only their presence, but also the deep and diverse spiritual, cultural, and generational ties they hold to the city.
It wasn’t until I moved to Jerusalem at 21 that this began to shift. Slowly, the lens widened. Alone in a new country, without my close-knit community, I was free to explore the city on my own terms.
One place I returned to again and again was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I’d sit quietly and watch as pilgrims from India, China, Eastern Europe, and Latin America arrived—sometimes weeping—and knelt by the stone where Jesus was laid to rest. Their reverence moved me. It deepened my own love for Jerusalem, not just as a place of Jewish longing, but as a city that calls people across the world into proximity with the divine.
No less formative were the conversations I had with Palestinian shopkeepers in the Old City. I was grateful when they invited me in for coffee, shared family stories, and recited four or five generations of relatives who had lived here. It felt like a privilege to learn the names of these Jerusalemites, past and present. However, along with these snippets of history, I started hearing things that deeply challenged my core beliefs.
Stories about checkpoints. About racism—sometimes quiet and insidious, sometimes loud and terrifying. About the suffocation of constant surveillance. About collective punishment. About bullying and harassment. About streams of young people leaving the city, because Jewish Jerusalem was no longer a place where it was easy for Palestinians to thrive.
A quiet discomfort began growing in me. Why did I, as a Jewish American, have the unquestioned right to live here, while people whose families had been here for centuries faced so many barriers?
The displays of open racism were easy to name—Jewish students storming Arab-owned stores chanting “Death to Arabs,” or the humiliating daily searches of young Palestinian men by the army stationed within the city. But I began to sense something deeper—harder to name, but perhaps even more devastating.
Why, when I visited my Arabic teacher’s home for dinner, did she go pale when she saw a notice from the municipality on her doorstep? What did it mean when I asked a friend about life in her (Palestinian) neighborhood of Beit Zefafa and she answered, “Wallah, we can’t breathe”? And what exactly was happening with the housing in Sheikh Jarrah? In Silwan? In the Muslim Quarter of the Old City?
It was these questions that eventually led me to Ir Amim.
Ir Amim is a Jerusalem-based NGO working for a future in which all who call the city home are treated with equality and dignity. Through research, advocacy, and public education, the organization exposes how Israeli policies in Palestinian neighborhoods deepen inequality, entrench occupation, and obstruct the possibility of a just political future.
Slowly, I’ve let go of the idealized narrative I was raised with and begun confronting the painful realities of the city I still love. My journey toward this work has been long and painfully humbling. Slowly, I’ve learned how the rights and living security of 40% of Jerusalemites—Palestinians—are systematically undermined. I’ve come to understand—and condemn—how the same policies that gave me, an American Jew, a “right of return” deny return to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees displaced in the Nakba. And how, more than 70 years later, the project of Judaization, the state-led effort to reshape Jerusalem’s demography, still continues through evictions, demolitions, and bureaucratic exclusion.
Today, I try to share what I’ve learned, with compassion and patience, but also with the expectation that we’ll use our new awareness to fight for something better.
As people of faith, I hope you’ll join me in praying: through a shared commitment to justice and truth, through the courage to reinterpret what we’ve inherited, and through compassion for those still learning, like myself, we can begin to repair what’s broken and build a future rooted in justice and hope for all.
About the author: Tess Miller is originally from the United States and currently serves as Global Outreach Coordinator at Ir Amim, a Jerusalem-based NGO working toward an equitable and sustainable future for all who live in the city.