The Road to Eilat

Most of the folks in our small group were doing a shorter tour of Israel.  Kirsten and I, along with Tai and Rick, a couple from Virginia, were doing an additional trip down to Eilat.  Eilat is kind of famous for being a big beach resort town, but it was the easiest way for us to get to do a day tour of Petra in Jordan.

We started out from Jerusalem on Monday morning.  Our tour guide/driver was a man named Joesph Sahar.  Unlike Israel, our last tour guide, Joesph was an observant Jew, or as he described himself, a traditionalist.  Where we have Conservative and Reformed Jewish congregations in the States, in Israel, you are either Traditionalist, Orthodox, or non-observant.

We had two ladies with us as well from New Jersey who were added at the last minute and they were upset because they were separated from their group.  Luckily we would lose them to that group in a few hours.

As we left Jerusalem, we made our way south towards Eilat.  The ride would take most of the day, but we would stop in various locations along the way.  Our first stop was in the Israeli Air Force Museum located in the Negev desert on the outskirts of Beersheba on the Hatzerim Airbase.

It was kind of a lame place, real run down, but it was part of the tour so we made the best of it and I was able to get my new favorite "gummy" popsicle.

We saw a lot of Israeli military aircraft that were used during the last several decades and we also got to watch a video inside the Boeing 707 that was used to free the hostages in Entebbe after an Air France flight enroute from Paris to Athens was hijacked and diverted to Uganda.

After leaving the Air Force Museum, we continued to make our way south.  We stopped and had lunch in a Bedouin tent and were given the opportunity to ride a camel.  After our tour guide told us about how a camel bit off his middle finger as a child, Kirsten and I opted to watch the others.  Our new friends Rick and Tai were brave enough to give it a try.  I chose instead to simply impersonate one.

We enjoyed a traditional Bedouin meal.  We go to sit on big pillows and eat pita bread and hummus and drink juice that tasted like tang.  Kirsten made me drink the strong Bedouin coffee.  Or rather, I pretended to drink it.

After our meal, we continued south.  We made a stop at Sde Boker, a kibbutz where Ben Gurion, the founding father of Israel, lived in his later years.  It is also the site of his burial.  The kibbutz offers great views of the Negev desert and all it's beauty.

On our way to Ben Gurion's tomb, we got to see Ibex, which are a breed of wild goats originating from the Middle East.  The babies are adorable.  We named the one we saw Lance.

I was able to place a stone on Ben Gurion's tomb as a way of paying my respect.  

The kibbutz also has it's own vineyard and I purchased a bottle of Israeli Malbec for us to enjoy that evening in Eilat.

The further south we ventured, the more it started to resemble no-man's land.  Our tour guide told us that the Negev is so desolate that it was even used as a backdrop for a movie about Mars, given the desert's resemblance to the red planet.

The most desolate stretch of the trip took us by the Ramon Crater.  It's not really a crater, but actually the end result of what used to be an ocean 40 million years ago.  The area is 40 km long and 2 - 10 km wide.  As the ocean and rivers in the area drained away, the bottom was made of a softer rock and eroded at a fast rate creating a crater like look.

The next few hours to Eilat were rather quiet.  I think we all took a nap (except for Joesph).  He woke us up just outside Eilat where we stopped at a place that he said had the best ice cream in all of Israel.

We finally made it Eilat in the late afternoon.  The city is located on the southern most part of the Negev desert where it meets the Red Sea.  Because of it's location, it now serves as a beach resort, while maintaining an active port.  We had a great room at our hotel with a balcony overlooking the Red Sea.

The Jordanian city of Aqaba lies directly to the east and was visible from our hotel balcony.

Shabbat and other Observations

We noticed a lot of things during our stay in Israel, especially during the Sabbath and tried to document it for the blog.  For example, if a Kosher business is open 'round the clock, they are still closed for Sabbath, hence the 24/6.

Below is a shot of Ben Yuddah Street.  Normally the place is wall to wall with people, but the place was like a Ghost Town.

Starting at sundown on Friday, the hotel reception desk closes.  A Palestinian cashier works in the back office and they handle the necessary transactions.

We noticed that most of the staff working on Shabbat were Palestinian.  Kirsten and I had a glass of wine in the lobby bar that evening and our Palestinian waiter asked us if we "sign on shabbat?" when it was time for our bill.

We also noticed that as a rule, Orthodox families seem to give their kids free reign.  There isn't much discipline and the kids tend to be unruly.  We noticed it on the flight into Tel Aviv, and we noticed it at the hotel.  The place we stayed was located next to an Orthodox Synagogue.  The women and their kids would sit in the bar area waiting for the men to return from evening services and the kids were just all over the place. One boy picked up a leftover glass of wine and started yelling in a mocking voice like he was giving a prayer.  

There were two of the four elevators that just go up and down stopping at each floor.  We had an Orthodox family staying on our floor and we overheard the young son say to his father, "can we ask them?" which we think mean't he wanted to know if they could ride in our elevator since we were taking direct elevators and they were on the floor by floor route.  They ended up having to go back to their room so they missed their chance. (Incidentally, they did not use a key card, they had to use an old fashioned key to open the door).

Each room is equipped with a timer in the closet which can be set so the power turns itself on and off.  Orthodox Jewish law is very strict about any sort of melakhot, or deliberate work.  Interesting side note: Marital relations do not fall under this definition, so "getting busy" get's a green light.

Shabbat in Jerusalem

Our last day in Jerusalem was on the sabbath.  Technically, the sabbath starts at sundown on Friday.  When we returned from the day at Masada and the Dead Sea, we said our goodbyes to our new touring friends.  Kirsten and I went down to Ben Yuddah Street, which looked like a deserted ghost town.  We were about to give up all hope of finding a place to eat and were going to go to Mc Donald's, when we came upon a little Italian restaurant that was open.  While their food obeys all Jewish dietary laws, they are open on Shabbat, so they have no Kosher certificate.  We enjoyed some nice Israeli wine and our waitress was a cool chic from upstate New York named Nadine.  She waitresses on the side and has her own Art and Jewelry company (you can check out her website at http://www.nadinessra.com).


On Saturday, we were on our own as far as sightseeing, so we decided to see the Garden Tomb.  The Garden Tomb is considered the Protestant version of where Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried.  The concept or belief in an alternative site to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, came about in the late 19th century by a British man named Charles Gordon.  The location of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre raised too many doubts in Gordon's mind, so he set out to find what he felt was the true spot.  We had a hard time finding it and ended up getting lost in an Orthodox neighborhood where we received unwelcome glances from the residents.

In 1883, near to the Damascus Gate, General Gordon found a rocky facade which from several angles resembled the face of a skull; since one of the possible translations for Golgotha is the Aramaic word for skull, and may refer to the shape of the place, Gordon concluded that the rocky facade was likely to have been Golgotha.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has its tomb just a few yards away from its Golgotha, corresponding with the account of John the Evangelist: "Now in the place where he was crucified there was a ... new tomb" (John 19:41). In 1869 a number of tombs had also been found near Gordon's Golgotha, and Gordon concluded that one of them must have been the tomb of Jesus. John also specifies that Jesus' tomb was located in a garden; consequently, an ancient wine press and cistern have been cited as evidence that the area had once been a garden, and the somewhat isolated tomb adjacent to the cistern has become identified as the Garden Tomb of Jesus. This particular tomb also has a stone groove running along the ground outside it, which Gordon argued to be a slot that once housed a stone, corresponding to the biblical account of a stone being rolled over the tomb entrance to close it.

Critics claim that the cistern found at the site was not developed until the time of the Crusades and that the style of the tomb was actually used much earlier (7th-8th centuries B.C.) and would not have been used during the time of Jesus.

Catholic and Orthodox denominations do not hold any reverence to this site, but it is very important for Protestants from around the world.  Our British guide explained that churches come from all over the world and hold services at the tomb.

After our visit to the Garden Tomb we decided to go back to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and see the actual tomb since we did not have time on our group tour a few days before.  We didn't have to wait very long.  The "bouncer" was a Greek Orthodox priest who wore Fila sneakers and had a blue tooth in his ear.

For dinner that night we visited the Jerusalem YMCA.  The local "Y" is housed in a beautiful building adjacent to The King David Hotel.  It also has a great restaurant called Three Arches, which has got to be the only YMCA Restaurant in the world that serves booze, which makes dinner much better!

Masada and the Dead Sea

We spent our next day at Masada and the Dead Sea.  It's was all a day trip from Jerusalem.  

We stopped first at an Ahava store.  Ahava (http://www.ahava.com) is a company that makes cosmetic and beauty products.  The majority of the world's beauty products come from the muds and minerals found at the Dead Sea.  I bought some mud for my mother and sister and there was a little men's kit with shower gel, shampoo, and soothing aftershave on clearance that I got for myself.

Masada is an ancient fortification that sits on the eastern edge of the Judean desert overlooking the Dead Sea.  It's famous because after the first Roman-Jewish war, rather than surrender, the Jewish Sacaraii who inhabited the mountain fortress committed mass suicide.

Masada was constructed by Herod between 37 and 31 BC as a fortress in the event of a revolt.  In 66AD, the fortress was inhabited by radical Jewish Zealots called the Sacaraii.  After the destruction of the Second Temple, more Sacaraii and their families sought refuge at Masada.  Once defeat by the Romans was all but certain, the zealots drew lots and took turns killing each other.  In the end, only one man would have to commit suicide.  Suicide is strongly discouraged in Judaism for any reason, so the zealots were very methodical for doing this way.

Below are copies of the pottery shards, or lots, that were found at the site.  These were drawn by the zealots to determine who would be the last one standing, and thus the one who has to commit suicide.

The site sits about 1300 feet on top of a mountain with beautiful views of the Dead Sea and Jordan beyond.  Some of our group opted to walk up the mountain, but most of us decided to take the lazy way up and ride the cable car.

Chuck, one of our hikers, arrived at the top all sweaty and exhausted, but still in paradise since his Blackberry had a signal!

It's normally hot as blazes, but the day that we were there it was strangely mild.

From Masada, we made our way to the Dead Sea to float for a while.  I had floated at the Dead Sea last year when I was on the Jordanian side.  It is the lowest point on earth and the water is the saltiest with a salinity rate of 33.7%.

You can't really swim in it.  You sort of just "bob" along.  We visited a little private beach and had a few hours to enjoy the area.

Before heading back to Jerusalem, we made our way to Qumran for a quick visit to see the site where the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered.  We actually saw the scrolls the previous day at the museum in Jerusalem (and it was kind of underwhelming, so much so in fact that it didn't even make the blog).  The site closed as we arrived, but our tour guide sneaked us in anyway.  We finally had to leave when the gal at the ticket office started making P.A's over the loud speaker saying "Please Leave.  We want to go home!"

Yad Veshem

They came first for the Communists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me,

and by that time no one was left to speak up.

-Martin  Niemöller

This was one of the many quotes I saw they day we visited Yad Veshem, the Holocaust Memorial.  For some reason, it's the one that stuck in my mind.   Niemöller was a Lutheran minister who was sent to a concentration camp for speaking out against the German state.  He wrote the poem years later because he felt  the church didn't do enough to help the Jews during the Holocaust.

Established in 1953, Yad Veshem is the official memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust.  The museum sits on a 45 acre complex outside Jerusalem.  The site is vast, covering the entire Jewish experience during the Holocaust. It is the second most visited site in Israel after the Western Wall.

The main focal point is the Museum.  It is comprised of 10 exhibit halls that tell the story of the Holocaust.  The Museum uses not only photographs,but multi-media displays and short movies to tell the story.  I learned quite a bit from the visit.  At the beginning of the war, much of European Jewry was anxious to leave, but the rest of the world closed their doors to Jewish immigration.  There is a quote from Prime Minister of Australia at the time who said, "We don't have an ethnic problem here, and we don't want one."  

The pictures dealing with the executions were the hardest to look at.  I am still struck by one photo of a group of Polish Jews who were being lined up by a firing squad and the man closet to the camera is staring at it and crying, well aware of his fate.  A very haunting imagine to say the least.

I was surprised to learn that after the war, British controlled Palestine refused to let Jews immigrate legally to the area.  Of course they came here anyway and in 1948 the State of Israel was founded.

In addition to the Museum, there is the Hall of Remembrance.  It's a large dark room with an eternal flame.  On the ground are the names of all the concentration camps.  We learned that after the war, Israeli authorities visited the camps and gathered up all the ashes that were still in the crematoriums and buried them beneath the building.  Of course there is no way of knowing who those people were, but their final resting place is in Israel.

The hardest part of the visit for me was the Children's Memorial.  A separate exhibit, it was funded by the Spiegel family (think catalog) in honor of their son Uziel who was killed at Auschwitz.  As you walk into the dark room, there are several candles.  Thru the use of mirrors, their image is duplicated and duplicated so that the entire room looks like a sky full of stars (a reference to God's promise to Abraham that his descendants will equal the number of stars in the sky).  The names of all 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust are played on a continuous loop with their name, age, and country.  Everyone walks out of that exhibit with moist eyes.

Beyond the Children's Memorial is a statue of an unknown "Righteous Man" (the Righteous are the non-Jews who tried to help and protect Jews during the war).  The story goes that after a group of young boys were left orphaned in the ghetto in Krakow, he moved into the slums to be their teacher and take care of them.  When they were moved to the concentration camps, he went along, and when they were sent to the gas chambers, he refused to leave them, sacrificing his life to be with them til the end.

The Garden of the Righteous honors those non-Jews known to have helped during the war.  Each has a tree planted in their memory.  Oskar and Emily Schindler are there.  (Oskar Schindler is actually buried at the Catholic Cemetery in Jerusalem).

Though it was an emotionally exhausting day, the visit to Yad Veshem was an important part of the trip.