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.

Acre? Akko? Akka?

In a spur of the moment decision, my friends and I made hostel arrangements and hopped on the bus to go to the small city of Akko. While not impossible to get to, it’s not easy. After a two hour bus to Haifa and then an hour bus to Akko, we arrived in the tiny bus station and made our way to the hostel. Usually we might try to wander around the city, but when we got to the Old City, most everything was shut down by 7:30. The hostel was FREEZING! Granted the outside world was rainy and cold, but the stone building was even colder than outside. We thought that we had to pay for heat, so we didn’t say anything for a day until it was so cold that we really couldn’t take it anymore. Then we found out that they had just forgotten to give us the remote…. The actual Old City was gorgeous, but a lot of it was still under excavation. We first went to the Prisoners Museum, which was a British fortress and prison where Haganah and Etzel members were held prisoner and executed. We got to see the Prisoner’s cells, including the special treatment cells and the death row cells. We got to walk with the “prisoners” as they did their exercise in the yard and got to see the gallows where members of radical Jewish groups were executed. Moving on from the Underground Prisoners Museum we went to the Hospitaller’s fortress and entered the vaulted halls of the Middle Ages. The courtyard of the fortress is still being excavated and there but it was still fascinating how preserved that this was. It was all buried was buried and to form the foundations for several buildings that were built on top of it. My favorite part was wandering though the little tunnels underneath the city… which was actually the sewer system.  But it was still really cool! Especially since we came up out of the tunnels in a completely random part of the city, which actually happened a second time when we went to the Templar Tunnels. The tunnels were built after Saladin’s defeat and were intended to be a safe passage for pilgrims in case of another attack.  Luckily the old city does have fantastic signs and we were able to find our way back fairly quickly. Before heading to our next stop, we went to what is supposed to be the best hummus restaurant in Israel. It actually wasn’t bad, which is rather high praise, considering I don’t even really like hummus. It was really busy and I’ve never seen waiters balance and carry so much stuff at one time! From the restaurant we went to the old Turkish Bath with a rather cool multimedia presentation, but other than that it was a bit of a let down. :P I was a fascinating old city that was surrounded by so much history.

Yad Vashem

There’s so much to see in Jerusalem itself, so when there’s weekends that my travel buddies and I either have too much work, didn’t get around to making reservations in a hostel or just ran out of food so we have to spend the morning at the market getting groceries, there’s still a lot to do and see in the city limits. It’s a little restrictive since, so many things still close early on Friday. One of the things that is always on the Must See list is Yad Vashem. The Holocaust Museum is very much what you would expect: depressing. It takes the history of the Holocaust from a distinctly Jewish perspective that is designed to make the Museum a truly emotional visit. Yad Vashem itself is in a beautiful part of the mountains on the outskirts of Jerusalem and the view before you enter the museum is absolutely breathtaking. As you enter the museum one of the first exhibits is the remains of things that were burned by the Nazis when the Allies began liberating the camps. Photographs, letters, watches. All these things were remnants of the lives of people that seem so easy to destroy. The other exhibits examine the rise of Nazism and anti- Semitism from propaganda to anti Semitic board games and yellow stars. The museum winds itself through the different rooms so it’s impossible to miss something. It also makes it a pain with all the tour groups since they are impossible to get around them.  As the path takes you though the museum it descends into the history of the Holocaust from their isolation in the Ghettos to the beginnings of the mass murders during Operation Barbossa, made even more haunting by videos of survivors and the remnants left behind of those that has died.  Leaving the main gallery take you to the Hall of Names, which commemorates all the Jews that died in the Holocaust, with 600 photographs and short biographies of the victims. Perhaps the most moving and depressing part of the entire museum was the Children’s Memorial. To get to it, we had to walk though a stunning garden and into this tiny underground tunnel into a pitch black hall. It is so dark that it is impossible to see anything, even after your eyes adjust. As we reached the end, we could hear a female voice reading off names, locations and ages of all these children at time of death. Finally, after coming out of the pitch blackness there’s little pinpricks of light ahead and entering the main room, there’s hundreds of little lights surrounding the path in this pitch dark room while the woman kept reading. There’s one candle in the center of the exhibit and the light from it is reflected around the room by mirrors, creating this illusion of  these hundreds of stars symbolizing all these children.