Hebron

Hmmm…. Maybe it’s best to start with a little bit of introduction. Hebron is a city in the south of the West Bank and is the second largest. It is a rather holy city, since it contains the Tomb of the Patriarch, which is where both Muslims and Jews believe that Abraham and other founders are interred. For a very long time it was exclusively an Arab city, until a Jewish group petitioned the government to allow them to celebrate Passover there…. And they never left. Now Hebron is a very divided city and is the only city with settlements in the heart of the city.  Half of Hebron is in Israeli control and half is Palestinian. In the Israeli half lives about 800 Jews and about 3500 Arabs. The tension and the violence are extremely intense in this one city, and there are about as many soldiers as there are Jews in the city. Many shops are closed and there are times when the Arab residents are not even allowed to leave their homes. I was on a tour with JStreet who had organized a tour with Breaking the Silence, a group of ex- soldiers that had all served in Hebron and had witnessed the injustice there.  It was really eye opening. Our guide was a great speaker and he really knew what he was talking about. The one downside was that we weren’t actually allowed to enter the city. Our group had to be served a warrant from the commander of the area that forbade us from on entering on the basis that they were afraid for the safety of our group. Basically they were afraid of settler violence and that they would strike out at us for touring the city. The kicker was that there were actually two tours with breaking the silence that day, and the other group got it fairly quickly. The only difference in  our two itineraries was that the group that got in were meeting with a group of settlers after the trip and we were not. As our group leader pointed out, it was disappointing that we weren’t able to enter the city,  but it was also showing us was it was like to live somewhere where you didn’t have complete freedom of movement. We did do a tour of the South Hebron Hills and saw a variety of settlements from illegal to legal, small to huge. We also got to speak to the residents of Susia, a small Arab village that was removed from its land for the settlement of Susia and then were evicted because they were living on an archeological site. The whole trip was rather striking. 

"Entrance to the Ark is not Limited to Pairs"

Ok.. well it wasn’t really a biblical zoo. I don’t think red pandas were mentioned in the bible and there wasn’t a whale or a leviathan, so that was a big letdown.  They did have adorable monkeys that were having a blast showing off to the crowds and my favorite part was being able to feed the birds. I had two lorries on my arm, until I ran out of food and they got very upset with me. There is a biblical section, with an ark which was kinda cool and with the walkway observatory we got to get really close to them. We had had a guide, but when everyone was stuck at the bears for a while, we moved on ahead. Which was good, because I think was got to see most of the park that way, and we still weren’t able to see all of it. I got some good pictures of the animals! 

Bus Bombing

Well, this is rather old news at this point, but I felt that it was kinda important to blog about the bus bombing. Everything I know is pretty much secondhand, but I was obsessed with finding everything I could out about this. I had Ha’aretz, Al- Jazeera, the Jerusalem Post, the BBC, MSNBC, CNN and several other papers on different tabs and kept checking them all constantly. Fox News was the most interesting I think: Witnesses Say Bus Bombing in Jerusalem. This was several hours after everyone had already established that yes, there had been a bombing and were reporting on casualties. There wasn’t even a story, just the headline. I also find it rather shocking, that sites like MSNBC and CNN were more concerned with the fact that Elizabeth Taylor had died than that there were terrorist attacks in the world’s holiest city. Perhaps what also hit home was that the woman that died was a Rothberg Student. She had been in Ulpan with some of my friends, and while I had never spoken to her, when given a description, I remembered her immediately. She was a fantastic woman and she will be missed. 

"So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David"

For most Christians making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, there are a couple stops that one has to have to make. The Via Dolorosa for one, the church of the Holy Sepulcher for another and a host of other sites. Also up there on the list of places to go is the city of Bethlehem. As the birthplace of Christ, this city hosts millions of pilgrims every year, each one wanting to see the birthplace of Jesus.  Well…. One would expect a cave or something, not so.  The original Church of the Nativity was built over the site  by Constantine and his mother St. Helena in the fourth century, until it was destroyed by Justinian in the 6^th and rebuilt it into a much larger church.  The original mosaic floor Is still intact underneath the modern one and many of the crusader mosaics and paintings are still partially intact.  We entered the nave and stood in line with  all the others that were waiting to see the lower level and the silver star that makes the exact spot of Christ birth. I wasn’t able to get a good picture, but it was nothing like I expected. The star was set in a marble floor underneath something akin to an altar. We saw that and the milk grotto, where supposedly a drop of Mary’s milk fell and turned a black rock white… couldn’t actually find it, but I don’t doubt its there.            In a spur of the moment decision after exhausting Bethlehem, we found a taxi and decided to go to the ruins at Herodion.  While haggling for the cab, a man came up to us and offered to translate, which was pretty much a godsend. Then, he wanted to practice his English, so he stuck around and was our tour guide for the rest of the trip. We explored the ruins and the tunnels that were underneath Herodion… which seemed to go on forever! The ruins were kinda reminiscent of Masada, which makes sense since they were both built by Herod but it was still cool to go see. Then our new friend invited us to his house and we went and met his sister, his neighbors and their kids. It was really a lot of fun and probably the most spontaneous since getting here.

We're Going Caving!!!

Who wants to spend a morning slithering on your stomach through a bunch of tiny limestone caves? Me! On one of the school trips, we got the chance to go explore some of the Maccabeean  Cave that are right outside of Jerusalem. These limestone caves were originally quarries and places for refrigeration, before some were dug to be used in guerrilla tactics against the Romans in the first century BC. There initially there weren’t too many tiny holes that we had to squeeze through, but after going through the first couple rooms, we got to the first little tunnel that we really had to crawl on our hands and knees through this little windy tunnel. It wasn’t very long and after a few feet we were able to squeeze through another small hole that lead to an even bigger room. The limestone was so soft in places that it would literally crumble in your hand.  At that stop we went around in a circle and told a really bizarre ghost story in the dark that had us all laughing. Really that was the only cave that we actually had to crawl through, which was kinda depressing, since I expected more. We also went to a bell cave that was an old quarry and two burial caves, one Jewish one that still had the stones that would have been used to seal the bodies into the grottos for a year, before gathering the bones and interring them.  The other was a Christian one with Corinthian columns etched with small crosses. in contrast to the Jewish burial cave, the bodies were laid out along the wall rather than into the wall, and were not sealed in, interestingly enough.  From the limestone caves we went to an overlook of the valley of E’lah, which is where David fought Goliath. It was an absolutely fantastic view of the valley, and there were some beautiful trees at the overlook. And of course we had to stage the battle of David and Goliath between two of the students and read the story of the event. :P All in all it was  pretty fantastic trip.