were 400 pilings that were driven down to bedrock to support the structure and not one bone was found.

If any of the building permits and the legal activities that go into preparing for this type of an edifice were found to be illegal, the project would stop. The Israeli authorities meticulously reviewed all the documents after which the Attorney General announced, “everything that the Mormons did pertaining to the legalities of the Jerusalem Center are valid.”

The students and faculty were totally forbidden to proselyte their religion in Israel. How impossible is that.

If there had been a moratorium declared, which was requested by numerous groups, if there had been a change in government where there were many that were not sympathetic to the project, if there had been a serious accident, if Jeffrey Holland had succumbed to outside pressures to sell the property by taking an offer when a blank check was placed in front of him saying, you fill in the amount. These and many many more obstacles drug the approval process on for nearly four years.

One of the final requirements was that the Church must find a physical presence in Israel prior to 1948, the date when Israel was given its independence by the United Nations. Some how, some way, someone came up with — John Alexander Clark, the young man from Farmington, Utah. Little did John know as he was studying the Arabic language as a missionary in that small town of Haifa on the Northwestern Mediterranean coast of Palestine, now Israel, that he would be one of the final keys that unlocked the stalemate between the government of Israel and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in gaining approval to build the Center. In 1895 he had contracted Small Pox and died. He was buried on Israel soil. He along with another missionary, Adolf Haag who had died in Israel two and a half years earlier, became the presence.