Our first full day in Israel

Monday, September 16

After a night and most of a day of travel, (Marrakesh to Madrid and Madrid to Tel Aviv) Nanci and I arrived at our hotel in Jerusalem, just in time to have a quick shower and get to the meeting with our CEO for this trip, Jalal and my 14 other travellers. This group once again has 3 Canadians, Nanci and I from Ottawa and Diane from Vancouver. And the balance are from various parts of the United States. There is only one man in the group so of course he’s going to take a bit of teasing. (BTW, to the Morocco crew, I’m missing you!) We had our standard get to know you and review of the program meeting and then headed out for a ginormous dinner of Palestinian food.

Today we started the day with a overview of Jerusalem from the top of Mount of Olives where the guide gave us an overview of what we’ll be seeing over the next couple of days. Sounds like it’s not going to be any less busy than our Morocco tour, and in a lot of cases we’ll be walking from one site to another. Our schedule has been messed up by the Israeli general election being held tomorrow, so things are a little in flux.

I should back up and say that I am not a student of any religion and so I may get some of this wrong this week in Israel and for that I apologize. Also, sorry for my brevity but it’s late and wanted to post something to get the ball rolling. We spent a couple of hours this morning at the Israeli Museum where we saw the uniquely domed Shrine of the Book which is a depository for some of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex, the model of the city of Jerusalem, and the archeology museum. Hard for North Americans to grasp how ancient things are in this part of the world.

Next we spent a moving 3 hours at the Holocaust Museum. It is all so well done. The building is magnificent and tells its own story, the exhibits make it all so real, especially poignant are the videos of survivors telling their stories. It was difficult to watch and see and I experienced similar feelings at Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland. The memorial to the 1.5 million children who were killed in the holocaust was so well done. It’s like there are a 1.5 million lights in a dark space, with the light reflected in a million directions, and slowly the name of each child that has been documented is read off. A few tears were shed there for sure.

Back for a break to the hotel and then out this evening, first of all to a book store in Old Jerusalem selling mostly books on the Israeli Palestinian conflict where a young Palestinian man whose family has run the book store for 3 generations spoke to us about the conflict from his perspective. No possible way for me to explain what he told us, except to say that he was articulate and compelling and he is hopeful that the younger generation will be able to solve the conflict.

We were then originally planning on going on to dinner, but our guide Jalal suggested we stop in at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre this evening while the crowds would be far less than tomorrow when we will visit it again.

And then we did get out for a fabulous tasting of Palestinian food. Our walk home through the deserted streets of the old city (along with the great mint tea, without the green tea the Moroccans put in theirs) hopefully helped to get the digestion started as it’s late. This picture of the hummus for Phyl. It was amazing.