Dear Moms, Dads, and Friends.
It’s been a busy few days here in Israel for the travelers of Shorashim Bus 397! There’s a lot to catch you all up on, but I will do my best to cover everything.
Thursday was a particularly memorable day. On our last day in Jerusalem, we visited and toured Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum. Museum is a misleading title, however, because Yad Vashem is a sprawling complex that spreads across an entire Jerusalem mountain maintained exclusively for Holocaust remembrance. There are forest grounds and sculptures and a second museum dedicated to the many children that lost their lives in concentration camps. Our tour guide Lior said that we could spend days and days touring the site without ever seeing everything, and I believe it. Before we began our tour of the museum itself, our group was privileged to listen to the life story of a Holocaust survivor, a wonderful woman whose name I am very sorry to not remember just now. Like many survivors, she relied on a series of almost impossible miracles in order to make it through the war alive, all while caring for her younger, sickly sister. She and her sister, who is also still alive today, have raised large families and now jokingly compete to see who will wind up with the most grandchildren. Of note in her already remarkable story is that the woman was neighbors as a girl in Amsterdam with young Anne Frank and her family. She described Anne as a bright young girl who wrote in a journal during school recess, telling anybody who asked that her journal was “None of their business.” The two girls used to play together after school. Later, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the girls found each other again, able to communicate only briefly from opposite sides of a dividing wall, and only late at night. By that time Anne had lost most of her family and was desperate for food for her own ailing younger sister. Our speaker was able to sneak Anne something to eat, though Anne sadly would die in that same camp just a few weeks later.
After the speech we toured the museum itself. Yad Vashem is unlike other Holocaust museums that I’ve been to because of the way it incorporates art into its exhibits. In almost every room there are paintings hung that depict many of the acts and convey the emotions that comprised the Holocaust, and seeing the two together was moving. After leaving Yad Vashem, my memory begins to blur a bit, which I think is understandable. We do so much every day that it’s hard to keep track of it all. But these are some of the things that we’ve done: We have gone on two more hikes, one of which took us to a little lagoon with a huge, towering waterfall feeding into it [called the Jilaboon]. The group went for a swim in the cold water to cool off. We’ve seen the Syrian border from an old military bunker in the Golan heights [called Har Bental]. We went out on the town in the city of Tiberius, one of Israel’s four Holy Cities that borders the Sea of Galilee. We spent the weekend in a hotel on an Orthodox Kibbutz and observed the Sabbath, which meant no elevators, hotel service, or work. It also meant a day of relaxing and a big game of Ultimate Frisbee in the day’s heat. Group members attended either the official Orthodox service on the Kibbutz or a Reformed service lead by our American group leaders, and we all ate a traditional Shabbat dinner after the sun had set on Saturday. Currently we are traveling by bus from the holy city of Tzvat, where we saw the sights and took a long lunch, to Tel Aviv, where we will be spending the next two days. The weather has been wonderful, warm and usually cloudless. It’s hard to imagine doing the hikes we’ve done in August heat. It certainly makes me glad to be here in May. Our group gets closer every day. I’ve made some friends that I think I’ll be seeing for a long time to come. It’s been great getting to know our Israeli group members, who thankfully remain with our group for our entire tour, which is actually uncommon on Birthright. Our tour guide Lior continues to entertain and inform us, though nobody quite has the heart to tell him that his jokes are really corny.
We will check in again soon, Jon Schaff
