A Day in the Old City

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Today's itinerary took us to the Old City of Jerusalem, of which there is a Jewish quarter, an Arab quarter, a Christian quarter, and an Armenian quarter. Everywhere you look there are very old things to be seen -- like these Roman columns which had been knocked over and buried but now have been restored.

I looked down at the stones beneath my feet and was somewhat in awe that people had walked on those very stones thousands of years ago.




What I find very interesting is the juxtaposition of very old and very new. Check out the satellite dishes in these ancient neighborhoods.




There is a vibrancy in Israeli society, partly from all children who are everywhere. School field trips take them to the many places they study.




Chassidic Jews predominate in the Old City. Once again we see a man dressed as he might have been hundreds of years ago holding a cell phone to his ear.




A must see in the Old City is the Western Wall, or Wailing Wall, sacred to Jews, who have come there to pray since the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. The photo below shows just the corner of this prayer wall below and to the left of the gold dome (Dome of the Rock).




The southern and western walls have gone incredible excavation in the last few decades, revealing historic knowledge of how this area looked thousands of years ago. You can see the top of Robinson's Arch protruding from the wall below. Below was the cardo, or walking street, lined with shops.




We were hot and tired of walking by lunchtime. A plate of hummus with pita and salad was just the right thing to give us strength for shopping.

Location:Jerusalem

Israeli Culture

We were offered a chance to enjoy The Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra at the bargain price of $20 a ticket tonight. The 29-year-old conductor, Noam Zur, is the son of a cousin of one of our fellow tour members.

Other than seeing a brilliant young conductor and an even younger violin soloist, the real treat was hearing the premiere of a piece by Israeli composer Yehezkel Braun, born in 1922 in Breslau, Germany. His family emigrated to Israel when he was 2 years old. My first thought was he would probably be dead if he had stayed in Germany. Instead he has had a long career as a composer and professor at Tel-Aviv University.

I very much liked his Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Orchestra, published when he was 88. I knew he must have been in the audience since this was the world premiere. Sure enough, at the conclusion of the piece, a frail elderly man sitting at the end of the row behind me made his way to the stage with the help of his grandson. I stood up and the rest of the audience soon followed as we gave him a standing ovation. I felt so grateful this life had been allowed to flourish in the land of Israel.


The composer seemed delighted to let me take his picture at the intermission.

It was a musical evening I will always remember -- the best of Israel's youth and the best of its elderly on the same stage.

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Location:Jerusalem

Jerusalem Today and Yesterday

Meet Noam (our guide) and Moti (our amazing bus driver). Noam is a secular Jew born and raised in Israel. He had three children, all of whom either have served or are serving in the army. He has the look of a Mossad agent to me. Moti has a sense of humor and thinks we are wasting our money on bottles of boutique Israeli wine.

One of the real benefits of this trip is the opportunity to hear presentations by people in the Israeli government and in other positions in Israeli society. We heard from two members of the Knesset who are strongly pushing the peace process, but who unfortunately are not from the major parties.

Today's first speaker was a historian who suggested peace would occur naturally on a 10-year trajectory. The bottom line is the Arabs must accept the terms of an agreement and he thinks the climate for that is improving. The second speaker was from the Israel Religious Action Center. She is devoting her life to things like making sure women can sit anywhere on public buses, Reform Jews are recognized in the State of Israel, and non-Orthodox marriage is recognized. It's an uphill battle in a country ruled by the ultra-religious.






Our first stop on the bus was at the newly renovated Israel Museum, where out of half a million objects of historical and artistic significance 6,000 are displayed. The most intriguing exhibit is of the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in an area near the Dead Sea in 1947. They provide strong evidence of the existence of Jews in this land 2,000 years ago. They reside in the above building whose white dome represents the lid of the urn where they were found.

But in the scheme of things, 2,000 years is nothing. There are other antiquities dating back as many as 250,000 years. I always say that a trip to Israel redefines the meaning of the word "old" for me.






I found the above photo by Adi Nes quite compelling. It is a rendition of the Last Supper, with Israeli soldiers as the figures. His message was perhaps that no one can be certain of anything past the present moment. How true.





We enjoyed seeing a model of Jerusalem from the time of King Herod. We had first seen this model at the Holyland Hotel, where we stayed in 1978. It has now been moved to the Israeli Museum, where it is constantly evolving as archaeological finds dictate changes.







Here is Israel's version of the Chicago "bean" in Millenium Park.






From the site of the City of David, currently under excavation as many sites are, we could look out into mostly Arab neighborhoods within the city of Jerusalem. It becomes increasingly difficult to understand how this city can possibly be partitioned. A lot of things are complicated here.






But one thing that is not complicated is the idea of recycling, about which the Israelis seem as fanatic as are the Germans.

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Round About Jerusalem

Soon after leaving our hotel today, we came to a blockaded street near the King David Hotel and an Israeli in uniform boarded our bus. I worried because my passport was back at the hotel. But he quickly went out the back door of the bus.



While we sat there, two women soldiers sealed off one of the streets and we learned they were looking for a terrorist rumored to be in our general vicinity. My stomach churned as I watched passing buses and hoped not to see one of them explode.

Eventually we were allowed to pass and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. We will probably never know if they found the terrorist. But there was no news of a terrorist attack fortunately.



We spent the morning at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial. We walked through the garden of the righteous which was created to honor those who helped Jews at great personal danger during the war. We saw a large memorial to Janus Kortzek, the pediatrician who had stayed with the orphans of Warsaw as they were all transported to Treblinka.



We solemnly walked through the Valley of the Communities, which attempts to represent the many towns and cities decimated by the Holocaust.



We saw a memorial to the partisans, the many men and women who offered resistance to the Nazis.


Growing in the rocks were beautiful flowers reminding us that life continues, even after so much death.



We drove up through the hills surrounding Jerusalem to yet another Holocaust memorial, the Scrolls of Fire Monument, created by Nathan Rappaport.






Lunch was at a modern mall, featuring kosher McDonalds and Israeli Coca-Cola.



After a rather solemn morning, we were treated to a wine tasting at the Tsora Vineyard.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Round About Jerusalem

Soon after leaving our hotel today, we came to a blockaded street near the King David Hotel and an Israeli in uniform boarded our bus. I worried because my passport was back at the hotel. But he quickly went out the back door of the bus.



While we sat there, two women soldiers sealed off one of the streets and we learned they were looking for a terrorist rumored to be in our general vicinity. My stomach churned as I watched passing buses and hoped not to see one of them explode.

Eventually we were allowed to pass and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. We will probably never know if they found the terrorist. But there was no news of a terrorist attack fortunately.



We spent the morning at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial. We walked through the garden of the righteous which was created to honor those who helped Jews at great personal danger during the war. We saw a large memorial to Janus Kortzek, the pediatrician who had stayed with the orphans of Warsaw as they were all transported to Treblinka.



We solemnly walked through the Valley of the Communities, which attempts to represent the many towns and cities decimated by the Holocaust.



We saw a memorial to the partisans, the many men and women who offered resistance to the Nazis.


Growing in the rocks were beautiful flowers reminding us that life continues, even after so much death.



We drove up through the hills surrounding Jerusalem to yet another Holocaust memorial, the Scrolls of Fire Monument, created by Nathan Rappaport.



Lunch was at a modern mall, featuring kosher McDonalds and Israeli Coca-Cola.



After a rather solemn morning, we were treated to a wine tasting at the Tsora Vineyard.



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City of Gold

It's fortunate we went to Poland first before coming to Israel. Going up to Jerusalem was like coming up from the depths. After flying in the middle of the night and getting very little sleep, we started our day with clear blue skies on a hill overlooking the city. If you look carefully, you can see the gold dome marking the Dome of the Rock, a most sacred site for Moslems. We said traditional prayers of thanks and drank small glasses of wine to celebrate our arrival in the land of Israel.




Even from that high vantage point, a look in the other direction shows the dividing wall snaking its way through the edge of the city, a constant reminder that not all is peaceful here.




This afternoon's itinerary included a visit to Mt. Herzl, the park where the founder of Zionism was laid to rest. It turns out one of the cute young soldiers we saw there was someone our congregation had hosted in DC several years ago. Here she is calling her mother to relay the coincidence. You get used to seeing young people with guns everywhere.

We returned to our hotel late in the afternoon, where I looked out the window at this breath-taking view as I sipped my coffee. Everything in view was part of Jordan until 1967 when the 6-day war returned it to Israel. I am constantly reminded what a small country this is and how often borders have changed.





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Location:Jerusalem

Beyond Words

It's mentally and emotionally overwhelming as everything you have ever heard about the Holocaust is there before your eyes. The greatest lie of all may have been "Arbeit macht frei" -- work makes free.






I hadn't been aware of what a central hub to all of Europe Auschwitz was. People -- mostly Jews -- came from over 2,000 kilometers away, sometimes traveling for 5 days without food and water and often dying enroute.

It was soon after taking this picture of the map that I simply couldn't take another photo of all the things that told the enormity of the crimes committed in this place -- the piles of hair, shoes, suitcases, glasses, brushes -- all meticulously sorted by the Nazis. As you are guided through room after room, building after building, you simply become numb to it all.







At Birkenau, where the large-scale gas chambers and crematoria were located, I was struck by the sight of one of the actual transport cars with a group of young Israelis walking past and singing Jewish music.

This experience in Poland has caused me to ask myself what I would have done:
-- if I had been a Christian Pole with Jewish neighbors. Would I have risked my family's lives to hide them?
-- if I had lived in the small town where Auschwitz was located and figured out what was going on.
-- if I had been forced to leave my home to live in a ghetto or worse yet to be sent to a camp. Would I have offered resistance? What would I have taken with me?
-- if I had seen my parents or my children being led away. Would I have insisted on staying with them?
-- if I had had to make Sophie's choice.
-- if I had been selected to perform a duty like cutting off the hair of my dead fellow prisoners.
-- if I suddenly had a loaf of bread and hundreds around me were starving.
-- if I knew the end was coming. Would I have taken my own life?
-- if I had somehow managed to survive the war. Would I halve attempted to go back and recreate my former life?

None of us can be certain of how we would have behaved if we had been forced to make the myriad of difficult decisions millions of people had to make during the war.

But we can say with certainty that the atrocities committed were beyond the realm of imagination.

And then there is the question of where God was as this all unfolded here on earth...

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Location:Auschwitz

A City with More Soul

The contrast between Warsaw and Krakow is like night and day. For starters, many old synagogues are still standing because the Germans wanted to make Krakow their new capital, so they didn't totally destroy it.







There is color and interesting architecture, not the drab buildings of post-war Communism. It makes such a difference.







As we walked through the formerly Jewish quarter of the city, our rabbi pointed out the empty space on the doorpost, once filled with a mezuzah. This was a grim reminder of what was lost. It is interesting that in pre-war Poland, the parchment actually fit into a groove in the wood, to be adorned by the decorative outer covering.







Krakow is filled with big posters like the one above, which advertises an annual Jewish festival, organized and attended primarily by non-Jewish Poles who are trying to rediscover things like Klezmer music lost when the Jews were exterminated. I would love to be here in the summer when it takes place.







As we came out of Schindler's factory, we were greeted with a wintery mix of snow and sleet. If you look closely at this picture taken out of the bus window, you can see another sign of a city with more life. The small black dog was one of a half dozen sighted in Krakow, whereas dogs were nowhere to be seen in Warsaw.

We sloshed down the wet streets in search of what turned out to be a rather disappointing market, me with my walking stick and my purple plastic raincoat from the dollar store back home.

Instead of buying amber, a new friend and I elected to drink excellent coffee in the warmth of a Polish coffee shop.







The day isn't over yet. We have a meeting with a righteous gentile, followed by dinner and an early bedtime, since tonight Polish time springs forward and we are on the bus at 7:30 am to go to Auschwitz.

Tomorrow night in Jerusalem, where hopefully it will be warm and dry and any anti-Semitism will come from a different source altogether.

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Location:Krakow, Poland