Yad Vashem, the holocaust museum (and be sure to check the entry below this one)

Today was a very sobering day. We took a field trip to the holocaust museum in Jerusalem called Yad VaShem, meaning simply “memorial”. I basically knew what to expect, the holocaust is not a new subject to most people of course. But it’s a funny thing about knowledge, you can know something in one way but not in another. In this instance, it was a case of knowing factually but not experientially. I can know about the atrocity of the holocaust, but not know about it like someone who has lived through it. Yet after experiencing this museum, even for just a matter of hours, I feel that I have come much closer to experiencing it, and knowing it in that way. How? Through the only way in which that sort of entire knowledge can be taught: stories, poetry, music, art; forms of communication that engage the whole soul, not simply our heads.

As you come into Yad VaShem you enter a long, concrete, triangular-shaped corridor, making for a sort of imposing ambiance. There are walkways crisscrossing the corridor leading you into the rooms lining each side of the triangular-shaped corridor. Arranged in chronological order, beginning with Hitler’s rise to power, and ending with the rehabilitation of the survivors, you really do feel as if you are re-living the events as you progress from room to room. Positioned throughout the rooms are various plaques, displays, artifacts, video presentations, testimonies from the survivor’s etc. Emphasis is placed on not merely the historical events of the time, but also on the individual’s lives – both the Jewish people as well as the gentiles alive at that time. This is accomplished through the display of such things as their artwork, letters, journals, and other personal items.

Day thirty-something.

So how often do you get to do archaeological work on one of the most important historical cities in the world? Well I got to do it for two whole days last week! Of course it involved giving up some of our free days, but it was well worth it. Our entire group volunteered to help out with the excavations on the site of the city of David, just south of Old City Jerusalem. What does this actually mean? Well we had a large supply of pick-axes, dirt-scrapers, and buckets. The way excavations are set up is by organizing the site into a grid, laying down sandbags or whatnot as dividers. Each square is slowly and painstakingly excavated by a group of diggers, which is where we come in. As we dug down, we collected pieces of pottery, bone, or anything else interesting that we happened upon. I was really surprised at the sheer volume of pottery shards that we found even just a few inches down. Unfortunately nothing we dug up was very intact, however, although we did find some neat handles from pottery (lamps perhaps?).

The experience of it all was really more rewarding than anything we actually dug up. It was great to just get off the Moshav, get all dirty, and work hard for two days. And it was fairly hard work. On top of digging up the soil with our pick-axes and scooping it into buckets, we also had to form massive bucket lines to move all of the dirt out of the excavation area and onto the road, where the earth-movers could haul it off. So for what felt like thirty minutes at a time we would just be passing buckets along down the line. Then we had to fight with the Israeli diggers just to get some more buckets to keep working, but that was more in fun (as I saw it) than actually problematic. I got a couple of opportunities to speak to Israelis while working, though not nearly as much as I would have liked. Some of us are planning to go back and volunteer again for a day though, so I look forward to that!

Enough blab, have some pictures.

You can see the sandbags positioned in such a way so as to create a grid, and each crew working on their specific plot.

There were lots of buckets.

I mean there were lots and lots of buckets.

This was a very exciting find - a fully intact lamp from the byzantine(?) period. The archaeologist is explaining the artifact to us in this picture.

And I went as batman that day, in my $3.50 batman shirt that I haggled my way into from the old city!

Brrrrrr. I just made the trek up here to the reception desk through the rain, which has been turning to snow intermittently, and the almost twenty mile-an-hour winds. I’ve never seen such tempermental weather before coming here. For example, the other day started out beautiful and sunny. Then suddenly this massive black rain-cloud rolled in out of nowhere, the temperature dropped by twenty degrees, and we had our own miniature hurricane on our hands.

Yep, in many ways Israel feels like a microcosm of the entire world. It’s only a quarter the size of California, yet they have just about every kind of geography and climate you can imagine. Beaches on the Mediterranean, rocky hill country, desert wastelands, beautiful greenery up near Galilee, and even a snow top mountain with a ski resort. Many different religions are represented even in just the Old City of Jerusalem. It’s divided up into four quarters: the Christian quarter, the Muslim quarter, the Jewish quarter, and the Armenian quarter.

Well, let’s start with some pictures for now. I plan to keep adding more, so check back every once in a while!

My room from the inside, which I rarely use except for sleeping. I do have a nice little desk that
you can see in the back there though, which makes a good receptacle for all of my notebooks and books and things. Yeah, that’s Chewy on the top bunk there.

This is our dining hall. I know, doesn’t look so bad right? I actually really enjoy the food here, there is usually a little variety and almost every meal includes pita and hummus. The only downside is that it’s all Kosher L The thought of a cheeseburger is becoming more and more painful every day here…

Paradise on earth, otherwise known as the sauna. We go there every Monday and Friday, the two days that it’s open, without exception. It’s also a great place to meet the older Jewish and Finnish residents on the Moshav.

Israel was the last place I expected to find a café dedicated to Elvis, but there it was – just down the street from the Moshav. They make a mean cup of coffee, play nonstop Elvis tunes, and have an impressive array of Elvis photos.

There was something cool up there…I wish I could remember what it was.

Welcome to Ali Baba Souveniers! You like, you buy? This is the shop of our local contact in Jerusalem, an Arab shopkeeper named Shaaban (and possibly head of the Jerusalem mafia?). He handles all of our money exchanges, engraves rings, and is a great source of information.

You see these guys all over the place! As all Israeli citizens are required to do three years of service in the military after high school, most of them are ages eighteen to twenty-one. In this picture you only see the men, but women serve as well. As you can see they always carry their M16s around with them, so passing someone on the street lugging around a big rifle is a fairly common occurrence.

You're looking down into the Kidron Valley, with Jerusalem right behind us. A little Arab ghetto has formed down there, a lot of the houses having been built on ancient tombs and gravesites. But that’s how things are in this little country, you can’t hardly dig anywhere without desecrating someone’s final resting place. Some of the residents are part of the Hezbollah, which makes it a very unsafe environment for American tourists. No, we don’t go down there unfortunately.

Ancient toilet! Who left the seat up?

Did I mention that it snowed here in Jerusalem? We even had a little snowball fight with the little Arab kids.


More on the horizon! Be ready for my next blog about our excavation escapades, and the Holocaust museum!

Osher uvree׳ut (to your health and good fortune),
P.N.

I'll catch up later. This time it's a quick recap of my day today.

Whew, another very busy fieldtrip day! We started out this morning at 8:00am like usual, leaving limited time for breakfast before it was time to pile into the bus. But today was exciting, because we were finally going to get up onto the temple mount – an experience we were denied last week due to the snowy weather. Getting to experience Jerusalem under a blanket of snow was well worth the delay, however. The temple mount itself is extremely large, and was almost entirely empty while we were there. There were a few other tour groups, a handful of guards, and we caught a glimpse of some Muslims making their way to the underground mosque up there. Unfortunately the mosque was closed to non-Muslims, and we didn’t get to actually enter the Dome of the Rock – supposedly the site where Mohammad ascended into heaven.

Not far from the temple mount, about a mile east, is the garden of Gethsemane which is where went next! A garden has been re-grown on the spot, and there is also a Catholic church built just beside it. Almost every Biblical site has been claimed by a religious group it seems. After quickly ascending the Mount of Olives, which is quite literally covered in graves, we hopped back on the tour bus. The tour bus took us to a hill in Gibeah called Tel el Fool, or “Hill of Beans”, where we spent some time studying over the geography of the tribe of Benjamin while sitting in a partially constructed building. Or maybe it was partially ruined, I really couldn’t tell which.

Finally, to top off all the events of our busy day, we backtracked to the Garden Tomb just outside of the northern gates of Jerusalem. Supposedly (and actually very unlikely) this was the site of Golgotha and the tomb where Jesus was buried for three days. Today the location is kept up by the Anglicans, who were gracious enough to supply us with a tour guide. After a full day of listening to explanations and running from one place to the next, including several places I didn’t incorporate in this post, I think everyone was ready to go home for the day. So we did.

There you have it, a day in the life. If I’ve left you feeling like you just read over a rather tedious blur of events then you know exactly how I feel after just about every trip! Next trip will have pictures to accompany it – I just happened to forget to bring my camera today :(

Thanks for reading!

Still catching up!

This is what many of our (more exciting) days have looked like for the past two weeks! We've been into Jerusalem over five times now, often with Professor Randy Cook as our tour guide. He inundates us with his superfluity of details which we quickly scratch down, and it all ends up being a bit of a blur what with constantly running to keep up with him. I'm surprised that we haven't lost anyone yet! This particular picture was taken at the ruins of an older set of walls built by Hezekiah I think...that's another neat thing about the city, its having been rebuilt so many times creates a very interesting conglomerate of mismatching architechture. The Wailing Wall is actually made up of about four different structures of wall, and each architect had his own idea of how to go about building a wall.