-Caveat Lector- >From Excite News, http://news.excite.com/news/r/991130/14/millennium-doomsday - Doomsday group lives in Bible days, awaiting end Updated 2:54 PM ET November 30, 1999 John Kohath at White Bible Family Home on Mount Gerizim in West Bank (Reuters) more photos By Paul Holmes MOUNT GERIZIM, West Bank (Reuters) - In their handmade linen robes, sandals and cloth head-dresses, the White family look like extras on the set of a film about the Bible. But the family of seven from Detroit, Michigan, are living the Bible days for real in the Promised Land getting ready for what they hope and pray will be the end of the world. "We're on a pilgrimage out of Babylon," said the mother of the family, Ader, 39. "I believe the millennium is Judgment Day and we are going to be judged." As Ader spoke Tuesday, her seven-month-old daughter Serena suckled at her breast in a spartan farmhouse with no electricity, gas, running water or glass in the windows. Outside, four more children aged 4 to 15 tended to the donkeys, chickens and livestock the family and two friends keep in the shadow of this biblical mountain near Nablus in the West Bank that, for the Whites, is 17 hours on foot from Jerusalem. "We just wait. And if we die waiting, fair enough," said John Kohath, a 74-year-old retired maintenance worker from Guildford, England, with a flowing white beard and a belief that the end might almost be nigh. BELIEVERS IN THE LOST ARK The approach of 2000 has proved a magnetic draw to the Holy Land for religious cultists, many of them fringe Christians from the United States and Europe, who interpret the start of a new millennium on Jan. 1 as the sign of the Second Coming. That's not what the Whites think. By their estimate, based on what they say is a corrected reading of the Hebrew calendar, the year is now 6000 and the end will come when the lost biblical Ark of the Covenant reappears at the dawn of 6001 sometime next spring. "We're convinced it is in Jerusalem in a cave in the Old City. My husband has been there. He knows," said Ader. "The millennium of Yehoah (God) starts this March or April. It depends on the first new moon after the vernal equinox." In Detroit, Ader, a former Seventh Day Adventist who changed her first name from Darcy, put her business management skills to use running her husband's business as a chiropractor and lived in a six-bedroom house set in 40 acres of land. Home is now a few bare cement rooms the Whites get rent-free from an expatriate Palestinian in return for tending his olive trees. It is the 38th place they have lived since selling all their worldly goods and flying to Israel five years ago. "I was considered lunatic fringe back then because I wasn't mainline Christian," said Ader. She rejects any suggestion of fanaticism or mental instability. "Why should we be fanatics for wanting to dress as it says in our kingdom?" she asked. The children -- bright, lively and eager to show visitors around -- have never been to school. "Green grass for the animals" is all Matthew, the eldest, says he misses from Detroit. NO PHOTOS, NO PASSPORTS The family shuns modern transport as far as possible, preferring to walk everywhere or travel by donkey. Camels were the Whites' preferred mode of transport until they found the ships of the desert fared poorly in 20th century traffic. The group is strictly vegetarian and lives off food cooked over wood by Rivkah Olson, a former piano teacher from Texas. "When I came here I changed my name because I realized Roxy doesn't fit in this country," said Olson, 63, explaining that she, like the others, had adopted a Hebrew first name. The group regards photographs as ungodly idolatry and burned their passports for that reason when they arrived in Israel. "All the police in this area know us. They say we're 100 percent OK," said Ader. But now there is a problem. Ader's 42-year-old husband Shomer, who changed his name from Mark, got a new U.S. passport in Jerusalem recently so he could fly back to the United States to visit his mother. He is stuck in Germany trying to return to the Promised Land because the Israeli authorities, waging a pre-millennium crackdown on fringe cultists, refuse to allow him back in. The crisis means the Whites have had to borrow a mobile telephone to stay in touch and Ader says it is all because her husband had his passport photograph taken. "My husband is in the Valley of Decision," she said. "Yehoah is saying to him: 'If you want to stand before my throne you can't do it with a picture."' FOCUS-Anti-WTO protests turn violent in Britain (Previous -- Dan S DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! 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