Israel Day 17: Modern Jerusalem

Here's my last impression report I have to write for the class. I still continue to do updates on the last few days here, but this is the last trip we took as a class.

Today was set aside as a day for us to mainly visit some of the more modern sites around Jerusalem. The day started with us spending several hours at Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem is a memorial and museum dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. I was unsure what to expect, but I was interested to see it. I’ve been to quite a few museums, and my least favorites are typically ones that mainly focus on history. History is just a subject that doesn’t interest me all that much. This museum was different.

Looking at the model of the place, the main hall doesn’t look terribly big. Dr. Rasmussen warned us that it would take a couple of hours to go through, but I was rather skeptical. The reason is that in most places such as this, I mainly look at the pictures and only read the signs that accompany the pictures that really catch my attention. I was unable to do that here. The stories told in the signs just draw you in. The most haunting aspect of many of the displays were the videos shown. Many of these videos were Holocaust survivors telling their stories. They were all so moving. It was like there was a magnet drawing me to many of these videos. Many of the people sharing in the videos were kids during this time. It was horrifying to hear them recount being lined up in front of pits with many others and then having soldiers shoot at them to murder them. Some of these kids were not actually hit but fell onto the piles of bodies anyway and were later to escape later. I cannot imagine what that must have been like. Nearly 90 minutes into my visit, I realized I’d seen less than half of the hall and I really had to hurry up and start rushing through. This is a place I really need to spend an entire day at to truly see and read everything.

This was one of the best, if not the best, museum I’ve ever seen in design. The exhibits and space add to the story being told without distracting you from it. I had no problem reading any of the exhibits as the light was never too low. It also had a very natural flow which kept people from really bumping into each other. I was just impressed with every component of the facility.

There were two places at Yad Vashem that really moved me. The first is the Hall of Names. It’s a large circular room with a deep pit in the center. Suspended above it is a large conical shaped piece that has hundreds of pictures on the inside of it. Around the perimeter of the room are probably thousands of boxes that contain the names and personal details of millions of victims recorded on Pages of Testimony (I had to look at their website to get it right). What struck was not the large number of records, but the vast number of shelves till empty. This is because they know that they have not recorded the details of all of the victims yet. They hope and expect to receive records on many more people.

The other place that really made me pause and reflect was the Children’s Memorial. This memorial is dedicated to the some 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust. Entering the first part of the memorial, you see pictures of some of the children murdered set into a glass display. As you enter the main room which is very dark, you hear a voice reading the names, ages, and country of origin of many of the victims. All of the walls are mirrored and the reflect a candle in the very center of the room. These reflections make it appear as if there are thousands, if not millions, of candles in the room. This really brought home to me just how many children were murdered during the Holocaust.

While I had not known what to expect at Yad Vashem, it exceeded every expectation I could possibly have had. It was one of the most moving experiences of the trip for me.

After visiting Yad Vashem, we went to the Israel Museum for a little bit. The museum is undergoing extensive renovation which means that most of it is closed. The two main sections we wanted to see, however, were still open. The first is a 1:50 model of Jerusalem during the Second Temple Period. This model is positively amazing! During this time, Jerusalem had three different walls around it. I had studied maps and drawings of the layout, but it was fairly difficult for me to follow. Seeing these walls in “real life” made it much easier to understand the layout. I also had no idea that the Temple towered so high above the rest of the city. It was an amazing thing to see.

After looking at the model and discussing it, we moved to the Shrine of the Book. This is an exhibit dedicated to the Dead Sea Scrolls. They have some artifacts from Qumran as well as sections of various scrolls. They also have a life size reproduction of the complete Isaiah Scroll. The exhibit was impressive, and it was awesome to see documents that were that old. I think I would have enjoyed it more, however, if I could actually read and understand Hebrew or Aramaic. I’m not sure about this, but I suspect it would have made a difference.

We next drove to Shiloh to have lunch and see the antiquities site. The most interesting part of this location for me is that this is where the Tabernacle was located at one point. The only problem is that we don’t know for sure where the tabernacle was located. This is because the Romans later came in and built there as well. When the Romans built, they built on bedrock which means they destroyed whatever was beneath it. Because of this, there is not a lot of archaeological to help determine different buildings were located.

Our last stop of the day was at the Garden Tomb. This is a location I had looked forward to visiting. Stupidly though, I left my camera on the bus. Oh well, I got some postcards that have better photos on them than I would probably have taken. We first viewed a possible location for Golgotha. I actually had already seen this as you can get a good view of it from several different locations just outside the Old City or on top of the ramparts of the walls of the Old City. We then wandered through the gardens with the tour guide until we came to the tomb. It was an impressive sight to see. This really caused many of us to ponder if this tomb or one very close by was the burial place of Jesus. Our tour guide made the comment that the actual location doesn’t really matter to him because the tomb is not what we should be concerned with. We should focus on the fact that all we can do is look at various empty tombs because Jesus is alive! He made a very good point. It still didn’t answer my question about whether or not this was likely place though. I talked to Dr. Richter about it and she said that very few scholars believe this is the correct location. Many still believe the true location is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Regardless of whether or not the Garden Tomb is the true site, it is still a good visual of what the tomb may have originally looked like. Visiting the Garden Tomb was a great way to end our day of study and travel.

This day also ended this class except for the final exam we have tomorrow afternoon. This is a bittersweet moment for me. Part of me wants this class to go on much longer, but I’m also totally worn out. I’ve spent the past three weeks trying to drink from a fire hose, and my brain is overloaded. I now need time to unpack everything I’ve learned and seen on this trip. The good thing is that while the class is almost over, the trip is not. We will have almost three full days to rest, shop, explore, and revisit locations in Jerusalem that interest us. This means I’ll have the chance to eat more food in the Old City. Most of us went out to eat tonight to thank Dr and Mrs. Rasmussen, Dr. and Mrs. Wright, and Cyndi Parker for all of their hard work for this class as well as just to celebrate the end of the class. If the other food I find in the Old City is half as good as this, I’ll be a happy camper!

Israel Day 11 and 12: Free day, studying, test, homework, and free time!

Yesterday (Friday) was a free day for our class, which means it's time to study for the test the next morning. Before studying though, we got to go on a field trip that Dr. Richter had arranged for us. I'm not quite sure who initiated it, but we were invited to Hebrew Union College to go on a private tour of the Skirball Museum. When I inquired the day before what was at the museum, Dr. Richter replied, "Old stuff!" That's good enough for me, so off we went to the Skirball Museum.
Either we're getting a bit more used to walking up and down hills, or the walk was not as bad as expected because we arrived 20 minutes early.

The Museum did indeed contain lots of old stuff. They had quite a few artifacts (mainly potter) from Tel Dan, Tel Gezer, and Tel Aroer. I was excited to see some real pottery up close and personal. At almost every antiquities site we've been too, we've seen scads of pottery shards, but alas no full pottery pieces. Whatever little museums may be attached to the sites typically have only contained reproductions. It was awesome to see so many jars, vessels, and other pieces made out of pottery. They even had a bathtub and a pottery sarcophagus! The best part was that we could touch just about everything. The professor who led our tour commented that it was all just rock and fired pottery. The only way we could really damage any of it is if we smashed it.

The tour of the Skirball museum was Skirballrific, but it wasn't long before studying for the upcoming test became a priority. It's hard to believe that it was only on Monday that I was sitting down to take a test. I'd love to say studying was fun, but it's still studying so...

A group of us had planned to take a study break after supper (I know, supper is also a study break) and head to the Wailing Wall to see what it was like just before the beginning of Shabbat. We had been told it was worth the time to go see all of the people gathering to worship, pray, and celebrate the beginning of Shabbat. We made it there about 7:45 (45 minutes or so before sundown) and it was pretty packed. There was a heavy military presence, but many of them seemed to be there to also celebrate. We made our way over to the wall that separates the rest of the area from the Western Wall to watch what was going on. We stopped at the women's side first because we heard a lot of singing. Groups of women were standing in circles dancing and singing very jubilantly. It sounded beautiful and was an awesome sight to watch. After a few minutes, we wandered over to the men's side to watch the happenings. Two guys were being carried around on shoulders and the rest of the activity closely mirrored what was happening on the other side. It was like one big worship party!

Two things I found really fascinating were watching what the men were wearing, and watching the teenagers and young adults. There was a wide range in the clothing the men wore from jeans and t-shirts to suits and hats to even fancier clothes. Some guys looked like they were wearing black silk bathrobes. I joked that I needed a field guide to understand what different outfits mean. Really though, it's not totally a joke. I think I need to do some more reading on modern Judaism.

The young people were really interesting to watch. It seemed that they were at a major social event. In reality, they were. After all, many of us find church to be a social event. It was just surprising to see "kids" who were 18 and 19 standing there in clothing that is fairly western, but with semi-automatic weapons slung over one shoulder.

After a trip to the Western Wall, it was time to mosey back to JUC and get back to studying. After class and our test today, I did a little bit of homework, took a nap, and then went to the Old City with Joel Bonner to wander around and buy some snacks for our next trip. We each got a variety of dried fruit and enjoyed looking in the various shops. It's so cool to only be a 10 minute walk (if I'm taking my time) from the Old City. It'll be nice to have a lot of next weekend to shop and explore it some more.

Israel Day 7: Free Day!

Sunday was our first free day in Israel. A few of us had decided pretty early in the week that we wanted to go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for church that morning. For those who are wondering, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is located over what tradition holds are the locations of Jesus' crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. I'll admit that I'm pretty convinced that Jesus was actually buried there. As for the crucifixion? I'm less sold on the idea as are a lot of other people. But that's all another topic for another day. Anywho, Dr. Richter decided she wanted to go since she had never been there for a service, so she organized a reasonably good sized group to go. We started off going to the Greek Orthodox service for a little bit, and then some of us started wandering around to see some of the other services taking place.

Greek Orthodox Service in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

I stayed at the Greek Orthodox service for about 30 minutes before I had gotten tired of standing in one spot for so long. That particular service typically last about 3 hours. I had trouble focusing because this little old lady kept yelling at our group if we stood in front of her, sat too close to her, or made people move if any of her friends came so that they could sit closer to her. This was rather entertaining at first, but got old quickly. It made the whole service feel pretty unwelcoming. That's the primary reason I decided to wander.
After being there a little over an hour, a friend and I wondered around the Christian Quarter of the Old City. I got this wonderful pastry/bread thing that was fairly eggy and had little bits of chocolate in it. I'll get pictures of it at some point because it was awesome! Plus, you can find them everywhere in the Old City.

A group of us met at 10 to do the rampart walk around the Old City. This is where you walk the ramparts of the wall from the Jaffa Gate all the way to where it runs into the Temple Mount. You can pick it up again near the Dung Gate, but we weren't motivated to continue further. It was interesting to see the city from such a different perspective.

Me surveying West Jerusalem from a watch tower located on the ramparts of the Old City. This tower was built sometime during 1536-1541

Roughly 33,000 people live in the Old City, but you wouldn't really know it just walking around on the street level because you don't see many residences. You mainly see shops and other places of business. From the ramparts, however, you could see the back side of the buildings and see where people live. It was especially interesting to watch the transition between the Christian Quarter and the Muslim Quarter. The reason for this is that about 10,000 combined live in the Christian, Armenian, and Jewish Quarters. The remaining 23,000 people all live in the Muslim Quarter. That means that it is much more densely packed with people. You could really see this from the ramparts. From a perspective above the city, it was wall to wall buildings with a huge number of satellite dishes. It was unbelievable.

A view of the Dome of the Rock as seen from the ramparts on the north side of the Old City. Notice how densely packed the houses and apartments are.

After exiting the rampart just to the north of the Temple Mount, we made our way through the Muslim Quarter by way of the Via Dolorosa to just before the Damascus Gate. The reason was that we heard you could get some of the best falafel in the city there. The rumors we had heard proved to be right. The falafel was delicious and to top it off they had RC Cola! A falafel or shawarma and an RC Cola was a mere 12 shekels (about $3.50). We took our food and went through the Damascus Gate to just outside the Old City and sat on a low wall under a tree and had our lunch. The setting was beautiful and the food was falafeley good!

Me with my RC Cola and falafel. Notice the excitement on my face...

After lunch, we mosied back into the Old City and made our way to the Jaffa Gate. Along the way, we did a little bit of shopping. We stopped at a shop in the Christian Quarter owned by a man named Shaban. We were introduced to him and his shops on our first tour of the Old City because he has very fair prices and gives us an excellent exchange rate at his money changing shop. When he saw our group walk up, he excused himself from the couple he was bargaining with. The reason he did this was that he wanted to give us something cool to drink. He got us a bottle of orange juice and some cups and then apologized that he couldn't pour it for us since he needed to get back to the couple he had been bargaining with. We were all stunned at the hospitality shown to us. Besides being hospitable, he was also being smart. We all commented that if he had anything we were interested in buying, we would purchase it from him instead of someone else. And I plan to continue only changing my money there.

The rest of the day was significantly less exciting because I had to study for my test on Monday morning. All in all, it was one of the most restful and exciting Sundays I've ever had. I can't believe that I've only been here for a week and still have two weeks to go!

As a quick side note, my professors, Dr. Richter and Dr. Stone, have been posting pictures and commentary of the trip on Facebook. You don't have to join Facebook to see them, so I encourage everyone to check them out here.

The Lights Festival and Bar Mitzvahs

The night we came into Jerusalem, we saw all kinds of lights around the wall of the Old City, and lots of music and people and a generally festive atmosphere. When I asked what was going on, Dr. Wrights replied that it was one of the last days of the Lights Festival (not to be confused with the Festival of Lights). He said that it's something that they tried last year that was so popular that they decided to do it again this year. Basically, they just lit up the Old City inside and out and people came to walk through. I really wanted to go to it before it ended, but was too tired until last night.
After supper last night, several of us went down to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to explore and see the main highlights after most people had left. Then we went back up to Jaffa gate, and Mark and Taylor headed back to JUC. Christy and I decided to stay and wander around the Lights Festival. There were a few street performers with light up costumes outside the city walls, but it was inside where the magic was happening. We The city was divided up into several routes, and we picked the orange one because it cut through the Armenian Quarter and then meandered into the Jewish Quarter where it looped around. The Jewish Quarter is the one we were the most comfortable with, plus we knew that there were searchlights set up on the Mount of Olives that we really wanted to see.
It was awesome! The atmosphere was quite festive. It was wall to wall people and many of the food vendors and little restaurants were open. If it weren't for the fact that I was still full from supper, I would have gone nuts with the food. It all smelled so amazing.
One of my favorite things was a building with lots of arches that had animations projected onto it. The animations made it look like the bricks were moving, the walls were crumbling, and that little green smiley face ghost looking things were zipping about the inside. It was a very entertaining 4 minutes.
Then we got to a terrace that overlooks the Mount of Olives, the Western (Wailing) Wall, and the Temple Mount. The searchlights on the Mount of Olives were all synchronized and made all kinds of cool patterns in the sky. Sometimes the even changed to different colors. It was awesome! Finally it was time for us to make our way back to the Zion Gate so we could head back to school. It was like swimming up stream trying to get past all of the people. It was quite an experience.
The whole time we were walking through, I kept trying to figure out just why they had started doing the Lights Festival. My theory is that they're making up for the fact that they don't have Christmas and Christmas Lights. When I mentioned this to Dr. Richter, she just laughed, but I think it has merit.

Today, we visited the Western Wall and it was a very busy place. When we were there a couple of days ago, it was much more subdued, so we were all curious about what was going on. There were drums, shofars, flutes, clarinets, and I'm pretty sure I also heard bagpipes. It turns out that Tuesday-Thursday are the big days for Bar Mitzvahs, and it's pretty common for them to take place at the Western Wall. We got to spend some time watching, photographing, and videotaping the events. When I went down to the wall, there were multiple groups of men and boys with big scrolls that were participating in the Bar Mitzvahs. You could see moms, aunts, grandmothers, sisters, and other women hanging of the women's side watching the events and cheering on the boys. It was an fantastic! If I ever get a faster internet connection here, I'll upload some video clips of it.
That's all of the major excite for the past few days. I'll probably post another impression report in a few minutes.

Israel Day 2: Tour of the Old City

Today, we did a 4.5 hour walking tour of the Old City. During this time, we just barely scratched the surface of it. Thankfully, the location I'm staying at is only a 5 minute walk from the Old City, so I'll get to spend some of my free time there. One of my course requirements is to write an impression report of the half day or day trip we've done each day. Below is the impression report I wrote for today. It's not great, but it gives an idea of what we saw.

I was unsure of what to expect going into the Old City today. I’ve been in the Old City of Quito, Ecuador, and I’ve been to St. Augustine and other old North and South America cities, but nothing as old or historical as this. Because of this, I had no idea what to expect.
I was actually a little disappointed upon entering the Jaffa Gate because I had the feeling that I had seen this kind of thing before. It felt a lot like going into the Castillo de San Marco in St. Augustine, FL. This all changed when we started really going into the Old City to meet Shaaban, a shop keeper in the Christian Quarter. Walking to his shop, I felt like I was in another world. All of the colorful fabrics hanging from above reminded me a little bit of the Disney movie Aladdin. It was like another world. Everything is so close together that it was a bit darker than I expected, and felt very crowded, even though there really weren’t many people about.
I’m always interested in the smells of new places, and a friend had even asked me to describe what Israel smelled like. Up until this point, I hadn’t noticed anything particularly remarkable, but then we went through the district in that quarter that sells spices. What an aroma! The best word I can think of to describe it is pungent. The smells of so many different Middle Eastern and Mediterranean spice blended together to form an aroma that was almost overpowering. It was fantastic.

Before long, we had made our way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This is one location of which I’d seen hundreds of pictures, read many accounts, and even seen videos. I was not sure what to expect, but I honestly was not that excited. When I walked in, part of me was thinking “This is it?” I understand the historical and spiritual significance of this location. After all, tradition has it that this is the location where Jesus may have been crucified, buried, and resurrected. But it was fairly dark and seemed much smaller than I anticipated. At least that’s how it seemed until Dr. Rasmussen started showing us some of the smaller chapels off to the side. He then pointed out the locations of some of the monasteries to it. These locations were far more peaceful and really felt more reverent to me. I felt somewhat uncomfortable in the rotunda, but I felt almost at home in some of those side chapels. It makes me very excited to go there for church on Sunday. I also just want to spend much more time exploring that particular church.

The dome above the rotunda at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

One of the two major highlights of the day for me was visiting Bethesda and St. Ann’s Church. This location was just amazing. There were very few people which made it seem like we had the place to ourselves. Singing as a group in the church was a very moving time for me. It was only then that I really started to fully realize that I’m in Jerusalem. Then heading out of the cool, airy church to explore Bethesda was an adventure. When Laurie found a set of out of the way stairs that led down to a small pool of water, it felt like we had hit the lottery. We actually saw water at Bethesda!

At the Pool of Bethesda. The actual pools were to the left and right of this image. You can see a little bit of one on the left side.

The second major highlight for me was standing above the wailing wall and seeing so many people there praying at the wall with the Dome of the Rock in the background. It was just a beautiful sight to behold. The angle of the sun caused some very dramatic shadows, and the Dome of the Rock absolutely glowed under the sun. It was breathtaking. This is another location that I can’t wait to go back and spend some more time at.

The Dome of the Rock and the Wailing Wall

The biggest thought I had today was that three weeks is simply not enough time to spend in Israel. I need to stay here a year to even begin to see everything!