Jerusalem - The Narrative

Israel – July 5-12, 2011

We left the house very early (5 a.m. taxi) for our trip to Jerusalem via Rome. It included an unscheduled stop in Cyprus because of storms in Rome; then the flight from Rome was delayed and we got to Jerusalem a couple of hours late. As we landed at Ben Gurion airport, Joe said it looked like California in the summer. The land and grass were brown, and the buildings not like in Cleveland or Paris. We had our first supposedly-typical-Israel experience when the driver of the minivan got in an argument about the fare with one of the passengers.

Eventually we reached our apartment on Shamai street, which is parallel to the Ben Yehuda Pedestrian street. It was very lively every night except Shabbat. There are lots of restaurants, gift shops, stores and street entertainment. It was time for dinner so we walked around the area and went in search of a couple of restaurants Abby had seen in the guidebook. We walked a fairly dark street and ended up at the Mehane Yehuda market. But only a few things were open there, and we hadn’t found the restaurants, so we doubled back. We stopped into a likely-looking gelato store to check it out, and asked the owner about restaurants. He recommended a place on Shamai, so we tried it out. They only had chicken shawarma left, but both it and the salads were really good. And we could all read the sign. So long as we knew what we were looking for, we could tell if the Hebrew was something close.

Wednesday, July 6
Joe gave 2 lectures at Hebrew University School of Public Health. Abby and I were on our own. We walked to the old city which was only a 20 minute walk from our apartment. We entered at Jaffa Gate and went on a tour of the Tower of David. It’s a good museum that describes the building of the first and second temples as well as the reign of kings from Solomon through the destruction of the second temple and Jerusalem. It also had an exhibit on the development of language including Arabic, Hebrew, latin to modern Hebrew and Arabic. Outside the museum there is an archeological site of the gardens. It was a fascinating view into that era.
Next, Abby and I wandered the streets of the market beginning in the Christian quarter. There are a lot of vendors who are trying to get you to look at their merchandise. So they are calling out to you: “Let me show you what I can do with pomegranate seeds”. It turns out he had jewelry in the shape of pomegranites. Curious. We did make our way to the Jewish Quarter. All the merchants sell roughly the same things: t-shirts, jewelry, judaica, pottery. There are also spice merchants. The aroma was wonderful!!!!! We were looking for a way out of the meandering streets of merchants so we could find lunch and a cold drink and found ourselves on Tifereth Israel street. In the square there was a procession for a bat mitzvah at the wall. We had a nice lunch of hummus and salad. I never thought I would see Abby order salad but finally it’s happened!!!!! Along the square there were groups of students and a table with a sign: Tefillin – Just do it. They were teaching people how to put on tefillin.

We meandered more along the shops and made our way to the Western Wall. Along the stairs that lead down to the wall, people are begging. There are requests for tzedakah and a lot of beggars. Mostly women who do this as their job!!!!!! At the Wall, you go though security (everywhere you go is security not surprisingly). Abby was given a scarf to tie around her legs. Turns out her skirt hit above the knees and women must be dressed to below the knees. So we wrote our notes and went to the wall. We inserted our notes into the wall cracks and prayed. It was a very spiritual moment for me and Abby also I think. As Abby finished she looked up and saw a dove resting on the ledge of a rock of the wall.

At 3 pm we met up with Joe at Jaffa Gate where we all stopped at a café for a cold drink and just a rest before returning to the shops and the western wall again so Joe could experience it.

Thursday, July 7
We slept till 10 am so we didn’t leave till noon. We were off to Yad Vashem. To get there we took bus but it took over an hour to get there. Buses in Jerusalem are confusing and time consuming but they have air conditioning. There is a shuttle that takes you from the bus stop to the museum. Finally we arrived.
Yad Vashem is a large complex of buildings and woods. The architecture is grey concrete with steel bars – sounds like a prison and this effect was noticed. It is a very modern and beautiful building. Pictures are not allowed in the museum so our pictures are only of the outside areas.

The museum begins with the rise of Hitler and the effect on the Jews. Then it takes you though each ghetto in Europe and the Jewish communities including Lithuania with an exhibit on Kovno, Lithuania. I believe my mother was from this city. Next the museum takes you into the camps with extraordinary detail. At Auschwitz the exhibit included a replica of the camp. There were the actual cattle car and wooden bunks taken from the camp. After the camps, the next exhibit describes people who helped to save Jews from the Nazis. These are the Righteous People. Included among the many are Oscar Schindler and Raoul Wallenburg. At the end of the museum you walk outside onto a panoramic view of the Jerusalem Hills. You really need this at that point for its beauty. But it also makes the creation of Israel even more of a miracle and redemption than it already seemed. The 3 of us stood on the balcony a long time just absorbing what we had seen. To exit you walk though a nature path that takes you by the children’s memorial and onto the plaza of remembrance. This was a welcome diversion after the museum.

I had been to the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. which left me exhausted with grief. But you leave and find yourself on the D.C. Mall. Yad Vashem also leaves you with this grief but the natural landscape brings beauty and hope to you.
We returned via a taxi cab. It only took 15 minutes. The bus ride was like an hour and a-half.

We spent the evening with a friend of Joe’s from Brookline. His name is Ari Weiss and his wife’s name is Shira Wolosky. They made aliyah in 1985. Joe hasn’t seen Ari since the 1980’s. Ari is director of Yad Hanadiv, the Rothschild charities in Israel. Shira, is an English professor at Hebrew University. She just wrote a book titled, “The Riddles of Harry Potter”. Ari, Shira and their daughter Nomi took us to a restaurant close to their house. They serve mostly kebabs and lots of salads. After you order you get a dozen of different salads and a flat bread similar to Nam. After dinner they drove us around and dropped us at the apartment on Shamai. It was a lovely evening.

Friday, July 8
We walked around the Mehane Yehuda Market joining the hundreds who were shopping for Shabbat. This market takes many blocks. It’s more like a neighborhood. There are vendors selling bread, fish, meat, spices, fruit, candy – really anything you could want. You hear the greeting “Shabbat Shalom” everywhere. There is only one country you can have this experience.

For our Shabbat dinner we bought a sweet challah, salmon, 2 salads (slaw and eggplant with red peppers both in oil/vinegar), 2 melons – a cantaloupe and some watermelon, also beautiful decorative candles. We dropped off our food to the apartment and then set off for the Israel Museum.

The Israel Museum is a newly renovated museum and is fantastic. But on Shabbat it was only open till 2pm. Outside of the main exhibits is the Shrine of the Book. The Shrine’s most famous content is an exhibit of the Dead Sea scrolls. It explains the beliefs and the organization of the sect that wrote the scrolls, and how this group at Qumran fit (as far as can be guessed) into the Judaism of the time. The entry to the circular building explains the discovery of the scrolls. The roof is made to resemble the top of one of the jars in which scrolls were found. At the lowest level of the building is a section Joe found even more fascinating. It contains the Aleppo Codex and a description of its history and significance. The Codex is a compilation of the sacred texts, beautifully copied and assembled, done around 930. It was in Cairo when Maimonides used it as the authoritative text for his commentaries, and many other famous scholars consulted it over the past millennium. It was feared lost when the Aleppo synagogue was destroyed by rioting Syrians on December 2, 1947. Many pages were lost but most were rescued. In 1957 it was smuggled to Israel. To Joe, this was more amazing than the Dead Sea scrolls because it was the physical book, the most basic text of the Jewish tradition.
Close to the Shrine is a model of Jerusalem during the second temple. It’s very detailed so truly extraordinary. The outside of the main museum is an art garden with lots of sculptures and gravel paths.

Now onto the main museum - we only had time to see the Archeology Wing. It traces life from prehistoric period to Christianity. It was well done and very interesting.
We left at 2 pm and decided to gamble on a cab to the Hadassah Hospital at En Kerem. We were hoping we could get in to see the Chagall windows. We were wrong. So we returned to our apartment by bus, less than an hour this time, where we relaxed and prepared our dinner. Everywhere we went merchants were either closed or were closing by 4 pm. Jerusalem was a very quiet city by 5 pm. Really nothing was open with a few rare exceptions for an arab store or Christian business.
It was nice to have a relaxing evening to read or watch movies on TV. We tend to be on the go a lot when we see a new city so by Friday I was exhausted.

Saturday, July 9
We found a free walking tour that began at Jaffa Street. Our guide took us on a tour of the street behind Jaffa Street, Sheviat Israel. She explained that this was on the border of Israel and Jordan after the 1948 war. We saw some really nice neighborhoods that were originally arab but they had fled after the ‘48 war. Israel used some of these apartments for new immigrants. Now many orthodox live there. Then we walked past St. Paul’s church and another church close to an ultra-orthodox neighborhood, Mea Shearim. At this point we left the tour in search of some gentiles who would sell us some cold liquids. We walked to the old city and entered the Arab quarter via the Damascus Gate. The gate was very different from Jaffa Gate. There were vendors everywhere as you entered the gate. It was more crowded and more ‘haggling’. We got a good lunch and cold drinks and wandered through the market some more. We wanted to see the Temple Mount but were told we could not, so I found a café and Joe and Abby went on the Rampart Walk. This walk is along the wall of the old city. They walked from Jaffa gate to the Wall, and then walked back through the city, because that way had a lot more shade.

That night we had dinner with Joe’s cousins. Joe’s grandfather, also named Joseph, was born Joseph Bella in Shepatovka, the Ukraine. When he came to the U.S. his name was translated to White. Joe’s grandfather then became a pharmacist. His brother Jonah had three sons who emigrated to Israel: Monia, Leo and Moishe. So Monia was a year older than Joe’s father, and his first cousin. Monia earned his doctorate in chemistry and, when he moved to Israel, opened a pharmacy on King David Street. The pharmacy is still there and named Dr. Bella, though Monia passed away in 1980.
Joe’s family had no contact with the Bellas until Joe’s Aunt Sara visited Israel in the 1960s. So that’s how Joe found out he has family in Israel. But only Sara had contact with them. When he finally had a chance to go, Joe was told by his cousin, Sara’s daughter, that Sara (who after all is 102) was no longer able to remember these things. So Joe went online, and eventually found an e-mail for a daughter of Monia, Michal Troudart. Michal has been doing a lot of Jewish Geneology lately so her name popped up. Joe emailed her and voila, contact! Michal picked us up and brought us to her home which is across a valley from the Jerusalem Mall. There we met her husband, Tristan, who immigrated from Chile in 1972 (a great year for a socialist-leaning person to leave Chile); and their daughters, Yael (19) and Tamara (17). Michal’s 2 older sisters came over also. It was a wonderful evening and perhaps the best of the trip. I took a lot of pictures from their roof. One picture was of an apartment complex that is at the heart of the bribery trial of former Jerusalem Mayor and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Many houses have a solar panel on the roof for the hot water heater. Also the AC is on the roofs.

Sunday, July 10

Late in the morning, we took a taxi to see the Chagall windows in the Hadassah Hospital. There are 12, one for each tribe. Joe remembers what a big deal it was when they were displayed in New York before being installed in Jerusalem; he thinks his parents made a trip to see them. We were all interested because the Chagall Museum of the Bible in Nice was one of the most wonderful sights of our year. They are very beautiful windows. Then we returned to the Israel Museum where we walked around the sculpture walk and then toured the exhibit on Jewish life and art. Wonderful collection of Jewish life cycle then an exhibit of Jewish life around the Mediterranean and also four reconstructed synagogues: from a village in Germany, Veneto (Italy), Cochin (India), and Surinam. The synagogue from Surinam (north coast of S. America) looked similar to the Portugese Synagogue in Amsterdam. The bema is across from the ark, and it is made of simple but rich wood. But it was mostly painted white, with big windows, and floors made of sand. Joe said it was maybe the most beautiful, to him, sight of the trip. There were many things such as costumes and artifacts of Jewish culture I haven’t seen before. The museum is definitely a must see in Jerusalem.

Next we went to see the King David hotel and across the street is the International YMCA. The King David Hotel is beautifully made from Jerusalem stone as are most buildings. The YMCA is huge with many programs, a gym, pool, and a hotel. We went to that area mainly, though, to check out whether Joe really wanted to rent a car for a trip to the Dead Sea and Masada. He had made a reservation with Budget, which has an office in the hotel. But our taxi driver that day offered us a good price to guide us for a day, and told us the car wasn’t as much cheaper as we thought because gas is very expensive. At the car rental office they basically agreed! And Abby really didn’t want her dad, who had not driven in a year, driving in a place where the drivers are pretty crazy and he didn’t know where he was going. So Joe decided not to rent the car. Instead, we walked up King David Street to the Mamila Mall. On our way we passed the sign for Dr. Bella’s Pharmacy. The Mamila Mall is a new construction of mall and luxury apartments. We ended Sunday getting falafel at Moshiko’s, which sounds like a sushi joint but actually is a well-known falafel shop a block from the apartment.

Monday, July 11
We began our day early at 8 am when our taxi driver, Auvd, picked us up and drove down to Masada. It was about an hour and a half, including a stop to stand next to a sign saying we were at sea level high up on a hill, and to look at the camels being offered for rides to tourists like us. At Masada we took the funicular to the top. Some people walk but not us – it’s over a thousand vertical feet and was already over 90 degrees at 9:30 in the morning. The ruins show that it must have been quite a palace when Herod built it as a summer refuge. And there was plenty of space and facilities for the community that held out in a last-ditch stand against the Roman tenth legion. Before the siege began there had been two floods, and that had made it possible to store a lot of water through the special system they had to bring water up the hill. There were Roman baths and huge store rooms and a barn the Jews had turned into a synagogue (Herod wasn’t all that religious and, in his day, had a large Temple in Jerusalem). So the place was well-equipped, but the terrain is as desolate as you could ever imagine. Water down in the valley but not the kind you could drink. Not a hint of green. Maybe they had planters back then. It is a shrine to martyrs, and to the Israeli determination to be free and survive. Another reason for “Never Again.” People come to Masada, as to the Wall, for bnai mitzvahs; we listened (at a distance) to one quavery 13-year-old voice doing the torah reading.

En Gedi Nature Preserve:
North of Masada, along the road following the Dead Sea, is the En Gedi reserve, in the area where David, according to the story, hid from Saul. Saul pursued David and was camping; David snuck into the camp at night and cut a piece off Saul’s cloak to show that he could have killed him if he wished. The two reconciled. One thing is sure: if you were going to be anywhere in this part of the world, that spring was the place to be. Abby and Joe walked along the brook for a little while, up into the hills. With the temperature now over 100 degrees Farenheit, it was too hot for me to hike, so I stayed in a shady area near the parking lot. They reported that the trail was very hot and that “easy” meant “there are steps to climb up,” not, “no work.” But they dunked themselves under two waterfalls and loved that.

The Dead Sea:
We drove to the public beach on the dead sea. It’s a steep climb down to the sea. You have to sit gently so you don’t splash the salt water in your eyes. It is a weird feeling because you cannot sink. It’s also hard to stand up but it felt great on my skin and was cooler but not cold at all. Sorry we did not get any pictures as our stuff was on dry land. It’s a very strange place.

Tuesday, July 12
Abby and Joe went to see the Temple Mount. I will let them tell you about it. They couldn’t enter the Dome of the Rock or the Al Aqsa Mosque but the area looks beautiful.

(It was quiet and peaceful, much less crowded than everything else below in the Old City. A large plaza with some trees; surrounded by walls with gates from which we could see views of the city and surroundings. But no way to go in or out almost all of the gates. There were clusters of people praying quietly, mostly under trees. In the morning there are not the large crowds that come to pray at Al Aqsa (which is why that is when non-Muslims are allowed on the Mount). Israeli soldiers were gathered near the entrance from the Western Wall, but otherwise few and far between. The Dome of the Rock is beautiful from the outside. We wished we could go in. The Rock supposedly is the rock on which Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac. Muslims believe Mohammed rose from this rock to visit heaven. Listening to this story during the High Holy Days will be different now that a place is attached to the story – whether the place is accurate or not.)

We left at 11 am for a 2:50 pm flight. The security at Ben Gurion is impressive. First, your car can get checked as you enter the airport. Our taxi was; perhaps because our driver was probably Arab. When you arrive you have to go through your first security level. There is a long line to put your bags through a scanning machine. While you’re waiting, an agent of Israel security asks you questions: why were you in Israel, where do you live, etc. We were even asked if we belonged to a synagogue back in Cleveland. I guess we gave the right answers because we passed the profile and were allowed to go directly to the Alitalia ticket window to get our boarding passes and check our luggage. Many people were not and had to have their luggage checked by an xray machine and go through another series of security checks. From the ticket window, we went through airport security like we are all used to. We ate lunch, found our gate and off we were back to Paris via Rome.

Some thoughts:
Jerusalem is a complex fascinating city. There are many cultures – not just Jewish, Muslim and Christian, but many sects within each. Within the Jewish people there are secular, religious, blackhats, furhats, ultraorthodox. Somehow it all seems to work for now.

The public transportation is mostly buses now. The system is confusing and there are no pamphlets explaining the routes. The buses are air-conditioned but crowded and very slow. Some make a circular route so it can take an hour or more to get from King George street in the older part of the city to the more modern city area. They are testing a modern rail system. It is at least two years late. We were told that when the train was full it could not get up the many hills in Jerusalem. But the govt. says the rail system will start in August. Hope it works out.
The weather was very hot during the day reaching into the 90s. By 6 pm the temperature fell into the 60s and was pleasant.

The cousins and taxi drivers explained to us that the economy in Jerusalem was very bad. Many young people are leaving Jerusalem to find work elsewhere. The very orthodox seem to be on welfare. The men study torah and the women raise children. I am sure some must contribute to the economy of Israel but it didn’t sound that way to me.

I loved experiencing Jerusalem. Shabbat with no stores open was a bit boring since we were tourists but the old city is always entertaining. I hope to return to see other areas of Israel. We simply didn’t have time to see the Galilee or Haifa or Tel Aviv. I guess I will have to start saving my sheckles!!!!!