This Year in Jerusalem


My visit to the Israeli capital included a visit within the wall of the Old City and to Ha Kotel.



Ofer and Uri picked me up around 8 am to go to Jerusalem. The highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem goes through a pass that was hard to conquer, but was, in 1948. Old tanks are left on the side of the road as a reminder.

Our first stop was the new museum at Yad Vashem , which looks like a giant triangular log wedged into the ground. The museum is well done, combining artifacts from real people to make the history of the Holocaust more personal. Yad Vashem has been here for years, but the many acres have served as a memorial to Holocaust victims without chronicling how the Holocaust was allowed to happen. This museum is like an expanded version of the second floor of New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage (the second floor is Holocaust only). This was the second day the museum was open to the public.

We spent about two and half hours in the new museum. It was the second day it was officially open. It's hard to take at times. I almost fell apart reading the story of a mother who hid her daughter in a cellar in the Warsaw Ghetto, and had people retrieve her. The girl then insisted on going back for her doll Zuzia, saying, "A mother doesn't leave her child." The girl had focused on the doll since there was nothing else to do while hiding from genocide. We also visited the Children's Memorial.

Our next stop was the Mount of Olives , which is where my grandmother's uncle is buried. When I contacted Ofer in 1996, he did research of his own and found the grave of my great-great-uncle The Jordanians destroyed various graves during their time holding East Jerusalem, and uncle's was one of them. In 1998, Ofer and his cousins had a new stone laid out. His great-grandmother's grave was on the other side of the hill and was unmolested. From there, you can see the "security wall" going up. There is a fantastic view of the Old City and the Dome of the Rock Mosque from my uncle's grave.

We entered Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate . The parking lot is even zoned to match the stones of old Jerusalem. We had a great lunch full of salads and then set off on foot to see Ha Kotel (the Wailing Wall) and the Old City . We saw the Hurva Synogogue's remains; it was destroyed in 1948; We were too late getting to the Four Sephardic Synagogues, which are among the oldest in Jerusalem. The Jordanian's destroyed them and they were restored after 1967.

After seeing the Cardo, an old Roman Street, we walked through the Arab market back to the car. I bought some yarmulkes in Jerusalem for my nephew and my cousin's sons, at whose bris I held them before the circumcision.

Tourism must be way down. During our lunch, two shop owners hounded us to visit them. The new parts of Jerusalem are also zoned to look the same, so there is sandstone everywhere. We passed the Knesset building; people are protesting the government's plan to pull Jewish settlements out of the West Bank and Gaza.

it was an exhausting day so I took a nap and then I wandered up Dizengoff and went to Steinmatzky's, a big bookstore here. I bought some books about Israeli history: 1949: The First Israelis; Michael Oren's Six Days of War; and two others. I was suckered into buying another slice of pizza "for just one more shekel," but that was okay. It was fun walking around Tel Aviv at night. I checked my email at an Internet cafe down the street from my hotel. I went to number 50 Shalom Aleichem Street to see the apartment building that Hanoch's grandparents lived in, and both en route there and back, a kitty kept "talking" to me, and I was convinced I had to feed her. She was gone when I came back with food, so I dumped the Friskies in the area where the cat was. I feel bad about encouraging stray cats, but I am a sucker for the kitties. One cat in Yafo almost followed me around.

I spend the evening packing up all my stuff. I sure do accumulate a lot of stuff on my trips.

Posted: Mon - March 28, 2005 at 02:14 PM        

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