Lisa's version of Israel...

Shalom!

Erin will tell you that I am an obsessive journaler when traveling, so apologies in advance for a very long post!

We just finished the first leg of our journey in Israel. We have spent the past week touring the country with the whole Yokel family (Erin's parents - Kathy & Uri, Grandma - Oma, and Brothers - Nate & Zack).

Our arrival into the country after 30 hours of travel was suitably adventurous and started with me being interrogated by an intimidating Israeli security guard because they saw the Lebanese stamp on my passport, luckily I seem to have answered their questions satisfactorily and was able to get through. Then we hopped into the wrong taxi at the Tel Aviv airport and ended up in Jerusalem instead of downtown Tel Aviv, where we were supposed to meet our traveling compadres. Luckily after a 2 hour detour we managed to meet the rest of the group and were immediately whisked away by our tour guide Kobie for a whirlwind up the coastal cities. First stop was Caesoria (Roman ruins), followed by Haifa (with a quick stop at the gorgeous B'hai gardens), Acca (where we ate our best meal in Israel at a small seafood restaurant called Uri Buri) and a final stop in Tivon (where we visited a cousin of Opa's) and ending our first day in Israel at Kfar Blum, the kibbutz that Erin's grandparents helped to found and where Uri lived until he was five.

It was really special to tour Kfar Blum with Oma because a few of her old friends met up with her during the tour and it was really amazing to think how much history they lived through and the heroic efforts that they made in escaping war torn Europe and establishing the state of Israel. When we passed a gravestone commemorating the first casualty from the kibbutz during the 1948 war Oma told us that he had died at the medical infirmiry where she worked. I must say that kibbutz life is very idyllic (lush greenery, a perfectly planned community with lots of children running around along the Jordan river and old people scooting around on motorized tricycles) but also bizaar and completely insular to the "real world". It was interesting to talk to some of the older generations at Kfar Blum -- the people like Oma who came from Europe and founded the whole idea and the next generation of first-generation Israelis who grew up and stayed on the kibbutzes -- and to sense the nostalgia that they have for the early days of kibbutz life and see some of their disappointment as the idea is being met with a new reality of a younger generation that is increasingly moving to larger cities. Kfar Blum is now staffed by many non-members and has built a lovely spa to attract Israeli and foreign tourists as an alternate source of income. Their main sources of income, creating innovative irrigation technologies and electronics, are now even outsourced to manufacturing plants in China -- welcome to globalization!

After two days at Kfar Blum we headed south to Jerusalem. On our way down, Erin and I spent an afternoon in a small town near Nazareth at Sindyanna of Galilee, an organization that Ten Thousand Villages buys olive oil soap from. The organization's primary purpose is to provide employment to Arab women. We spent the afternoon visiting with 5 women who were packaging an order of Ten Thousand Villages soaps and also talking to Hadas, the founder of the organization. It was fun for me to use some of my (very) rusty arabic skills talking to the women. Hadas is also a very interesting person -- she is a Jewish Israeli woman who grew up on a kibbutz and had a transformative experience during her college years that led her to decide to devote her life to workers rights and improving the status of Arab women in Israel by creating job opportunities. I enjoyed getting a different perspective on current events in Israel from her.

We spent the next day in Jerusalem. On my first trip to Jerusalem and also on this more recent visit I have found the city to be both incredibly beautiful but also painful to visit. We spent an entire morning touring Yed Vashem, the Holocaust museum. It is an excellent museum and memorial to the people who died or lost loved ones in the Holocaust. One of the most moving exhibits was a large stone monument that was built to reflect the map of Europe and has stone carvings for each of the Jewish communities that was impacted by the Holocaust. It is almost too much to take in the massive scope of it at once. We were able to find the cities in Czech Republic and Austria where Erin's grandparents lived prior to the war and where they lost many of their relatives during the war. Later, inside of the museum, Kathy was able to locate the record for Uri's grandfather, Karl Jokl, among the records of the Holocaust victims -- he died in 1944 at Auschwitz.

In the afternoon we toured the old city and many of the religious historical sites. There is a lot of palpable tension in the country between the Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis and Palestinians. Jerusalem seems to encapsulate these tensions more than any other place, partly because of the geography of the old city. It is amazing to think about all of the history that has taken place -- to go from the Church of the Holy Sepulchar to the Wailing Wall, with a view of the Dome of the Rock and see how significant this place is to Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It is sad that such a holy and spiritual place is also the source of some of the world's most painful and violent conflicts.

After leaving Jerusalem we had a nice respite from our fast-paced agenda with visits to Mossada and the Dead Sea. We went to the Mossada in the morning. It is a large mountain near the West Bank where the oldest synagogue in Israel, built by King Herrod, sits on top of a mountain. It is the site where the Jewish army took a heroic last stand before being defeated by the Romans. The hike up the mountain was pretty steep, but the views from the top were spectacular overlooking the dead sea. We spent the afternoon relaxing at a spa near the Dead Sea where we took a dip in the mud pit and floated in the sea, ending up in the hot springs with a glass of wine:)

The next day we toured Jaffa and Tel Aviv and went to a fairly small museum called the Ayalone Institute, which was the site of a secret bullet factory that operated from 1945-48. The factory was built underneath a kibbutz and operated under cover until the founding of Israel. The people who worked there had to keep it a secret from their families and other members of the Kibbutz. It is a relatively small historical site, but it had a huge significance in the 1948 war. Its amazing to think that the people who risked their lives to work there were 6 years younger than me when it started.

On our last day it was just Erin and me, her family left the day before, and we decided to take a break from touring and enjoyed a deliciously lazy day lounging on the beach in Tel Aviv. Today we left Tel Aviv and landed in Cairo, but not before enduring another intense interrogation by Israeli security on the way out of the country...!