Neot Kedumim

This week’s field trip was super duper fun! We went to a place called Neot Kedumim that’s a lot like the Western Family Heritage Center in Providence, only for the Bible times.  We had a really awesome guide.  She taught us a ton of cool stuff!

The first thing we did was to learn about sheep herding and why the Bible uses sheep as a symbol so often.  It’s pretty much because they are a lot like us… soft and fluffy.  We then got to do a little of our own sheep herding!  Not gonna lie, we did pretty dang awesome!  By the end, those sheep knew exactly who was da boss.

Next, we learned about the herb, Hyssop.  If I remember correctly it’s used in the Bible to symbolize being meek and humble.  Then we got to crush our own to use for later.

The finished product.

Well, later was at lunchtime when we got to make our very own pitas and lentil soup!  It was delicious!  It made me really miss girl’s camp.

Preparing the dough.

Yay for cooking the pita!  Thanks to our wonderful Eagle Scouts that started the fire!

My pita and hyssop!

We also made lentil soup which I ate my second pita with. :)

Good to know.

Eating a fig.

Fun bridge we had to try and get across. I almost did the splits a couple times. :)  

 Another cool thing we learned about was the threshing floor and how it was used.  I think that reading the bible will be a lot easier now that I know what they’re actually talking about when they refer to the threshing floor!  On thing she told us was that it took an hour’s work to produce only 1 kilo of flour!  Wow.

Yes I realize this is awkward.  Just pretend I'm a donkey on the threshing floor, cutting the hay.

The last stop we made was to learn about the writing of the Torah.  There’s a lot of rules that go into it.  The animal skin must be from a clean animal.  If they mess up, they have to stop and start over.

Scribe doing his thing.

The Torah scribe talking to our tour guide.

Reading from the Torah is tricky.

Fishies!!!!!!!!

Well, Sunday we got to day a day-long trip to Israel’s #1 tourist city, Eilat, and go snorkeling!!!!  It was so much fun!  I’ve only been snorkeling once, and there weren’t any fishes to be seen, so I was really excited for this. 

There were a lot of cool fishes that I got to see.  I wish I could have spent more time in the water, but there weren’t enough snorkels for everyone, so we had to take turns.  But it was still fun to hang out on the beach!  After the lifeguard left, we couldn’t go into the water and the buses hadn’t come to pick us up, so a bunch of us started to play a game of football!  (Have I mentioned that I LOVE football?)  Anyways, my team started on defense, and we were able to keep them from scoring a touchdown.  Well, on our first offensive play, who was the ball thrown to????  ME!!!!!!!!!  AND I MADE A TOUCHDOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Everyone was a pretty shocked.  Haha  I did get a little cut up from the rocky sand, but it was so worth it!

Afterwards, we all went and had dinner together.  We were given vouchers for free ice cream and I had probably the best strawberry ice cream in my entire life!!!!!!!!!  It was the perfect end to the perfect day.

Beautiful Coral.  The beach is a National Park that works really hard to preserve this natural habitat.

Panorama of our beach.

Me and Sar-Bear looking fly!

Yay for fabulous roommates!

Sunbathing.  Please notice that my towel (the one with the big Y on it) is empty.  I must have been out snorkeling. :)

View of the city.  I couldn't really get a good shot of all the really cool hotels.

Our beautiful beach.

This is a parrot fish.  It was my favorite fish that I got to see while I was snorkeling.  One swam right up to me!  They have some pretty scary teeth!  Luckily it didn't bite me though.  (Juan did get bitten by a fish! )

Shabat Shalom!

On Friday night, a group of us got our turn to go to a service at a synagogue.  We went to a reform synagogue called, Kehilat Kol HaNeshama for a pre-Shabat service.  It lasted about an hour and a half, and pretty much, we sang the entire time!  They gave us the songbooks with English translations in them.   They were really hard to follow along because a lot of stuff gets repeated.  It was really fun to see what our Professor, Ophir, does each week though.  Everyone there was really happy and full of life.  Brook made a good insight that she likes that they have a service to help them get mentally prepared for the Sabbath.  I think that being mentally reverent is something that we all have improvements to be made.  Too often, all I do is worry about getting to church on time because I slept in too long.

Me and my beautiful roommate, Emily, with our song books in the Synagogue.

Nate sporting his Kippah. 

Wall of Separation 101

We had a special fieldtrip about the Separation Wall. The first thing to know is that it isn’t like the Great Wall of China that goes on for miles and miles.  Most of it is actually just barbed-wire fence with a 50-yard boundary of sand to show if anyone crossed over.  The places where there are walls are through the cities where there’s no room to have a 50-yard border.  The controversy of the wall is that the Israeli’s didn’t put the wall right on the border between the West Bank and Israel, which is what they’re protecting themselves from.  Instead, they put the wall between the Israeli’s and Palestinians.  (Palestinians are Arabs that live in Israel)  On top of that, Israel put some of the Palestinian land on their side to include some Israeli settlements on the outskirts of Jerusalem.  The Israeli’s claim they had to do it for security.  Because of the separation wall, there are farmers who can’t get to land, people that couldn’t get to their jobs (the Jerusalem center had to find a new kitchen staff because of it) and there were even lots of deaths just a couple blocks away from the Jerusalem center because half the city got separated from all the hospitals, so they couldn’t treat the sick or injured.  The separation wall is a huge problem.  Palestinians have a very hard time getting around.  Unless they have the correct documentation, they aren’t permitted to go through the checkpoints to get to the other side.  There are some places where people can’t go anywhere.  People who live in the Gaza strip will never be able to get out.  Our tour guide said that the only solution to make peace and over come the conflict is the 2-state solution.  But there are no steps being taken towards that currently.

Wall near the Jerusalem Center that goes right in the middle of the city.

Apparently the wall closed of Jericho Road.

Standing in front of the Separation Wall is no smiling matter.

Friends overlooking the Judean wilderness.  If you look closely, you can see part of the wall town below kind of by my shoulder.

And Thus Began The Nineteenth Year....

Well, I am now officially 19!!!!!!  I feel like saying that I’m 19 makes it a lot less obvious that I’m the baby of the group because there are a couple other girl that haven’t turned 20 yet.  We didn’t have very many classes, so afterwards a group of my dear friends went with me to go get some DELICIOUS gelato in West Jerusalem!  It was a great day. J  Yay for having a birthday in the Holy Land!!!! J

It's JC tradition that all the girls get hoisted up and down in a chair on their birthday.  So......  this is me getting hoisted 19 times.

My wonderful friends that got birthday ice cream with me. :)

My dear friend, Brianne, who will be getting married to one of my family's favorite people, Dustin Murdock, when we return to the states! :)  Yay!

Palestinian/ Israeli Conflict Notes

Here's a little history on the Palestinian and Israeli conflict.  Sorry for the scattered, incomplete thoughts. (also, I would put it in bullet format to organize it better, but since people here read from right to left, the tab button won't work)

Basic Problem:
One land.  Two communities (Israel and Palestinians)  What do you do when one group has lived in the land for centuries, and the other lived there before and wants it back?

Jews:
From time of Joshua to Roman destruction of the temple.  They were here first

Arabs: from the Islamic Empires

Jews start returning to Israel with Zionist movement.

Mandate Period:  British helping Arabs overthrow the Turks (who were allies with the Germans)  British promised Arabs independence if they would help them.  Gave countries such as Iraq and Iran to Arab rule.  Kept Israel under British rule until they became self-governing.

1917:  Balfour Declaration
"His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities

Unit Partition:  British gives them their own states.  Israel state is unconnected.  Jerusalem= world center.  War immediately breaks out, Israeli now has control over most areas.  Palestinians have never had their own state.  Jordan controlled the west bank, Egypt controlled the Gaza strip.

Six-day War: Israel preemptive attack on Egypt. Israel gains Gaza, West Bank, Golan Heights, Sinai (gives back to Egypt later)
Gaza now ruled by Hamas, but it's heavily guarded- least amount of in and out as possible.

UN is technically against this, but they are doing nothing to help the Palestinians
UN resolution 242
The security council expressing its conned concern with the grave situation in the middle east,  Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every state in the area can live in security.....

Intifada 1987
Palestinian resistance against israeli occupation- rocks and strikes

Oslo Accord:  Withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and the West Bank (except Hebron).  Palestinian self-rule of those areas.  Israel recognized as a state.

Second Entifada:  Ariel Sharon (guy threw out PLO).  Goes up on the temple mount to show that Israel still controls the Temple Mount.  Thousands of lives were killed because of it because of the sacredness of the Temple Mount that Palestinians hold.

Suicide bombings start occurring.  Why?
(over 100 occurred since the year 2000)  Palestinians are under martial law.  Israeli soldiers can go into their homes at any time and arrest, beat up, etc. anytime they want.  They are trying to make Israeli's feel the same terror that Palestinians feel in occupied Israel. Lack of conventional weapons.  Rewards   for families, hopelessness

Palestinians are starting to accept that Israeli's aren't going away.

Israel won't give back land because of security, they built the infrastructure, et.

Why does US support Israel?  cold war days, we need a strong ally in this area, they have more of a democratic gov. , Christian perspective- prophecy that they would get Israel back

Palestinians want land, return of refugees (2 million total throughout Near East and Africa), reparations, statehood

this leads to the building of the Separation Wall

Is this a political or religious struggle?  Yes. :)

Israel wants to be recognized as a "Jewish" state
religion

Why can't they overcome main issues?

Israel- settlements
Palestine- right to return
both- Jerusalem

Yad Vashem

Going to the Holocaust Museum was a very significant experience while here.  I have been to the holocaust museum in D.C., so I thought I knew what to expect.  It was not near as graphic as the D.C. museum.  It focused more on individual stories rather than on statistics about the general event, which I really liked because it made it easier to imagine what it would have been like.

The Holocaust Museum: Yad Vashem

  One astonishing thing that I learned is that for years and years, Holocaust survivors were looked down upon.  There are two monuments in the front.  One of the Warsaw Revolt and the other depicting Jews going "like sheep to the slaughter".  In Israeli perspective, a good jew is heroic like those of the Warsaw revolt.  The survivors were like the sheep going to the slaughter.  They feel that survivors should have fought back.  They felt that the everyone survived at the expense of someone else's life.  It shocked me to learn that Israeli had such harsh views to people that went through something that was so terrifying and horrible.  It wasn't until the Olympics in Germany in 1972, when some Israeli wrestlers were kidnapped and killed, that the viewpoint on survivors began to change.  This event made them realize that it was not cowardly at all not to fight back.  if anyone would be able to have courage to fight back, it would be Olympic wrestlers.  But they didn't because they thought that if they cooperated, they would have a better chance of surviving.  this same thing applied to the Holocaust victims.  They were told if they would cooperate, that they would live.  One other important thing to remember is that the Nazis were very deceitful.  The Jews had no idea that they were headed to concentration camps rather than labor camps.  They were not cowardly.  I don't think anyone of us would have behaved any differently.  We all just want to survive.

"The camp's law is that those going to their death should be deceived until the end."

-Tadeusz Borowski

Monument celebrating the Warsaw Revolt heroes

Monument of Jews going "like sheep to the slaughter".  Notice how different the people are depicted in these 2 monuments.

Tower of Heroes Memorial.  Dedicated to the Heroes of the Warsaw Revolt.  This pillar is the highest point of the area because Israel holds them in the highest esteem.

I didn't get as emotionally overwhelmed as I did when I went to D.C., but I did feel like I was hit by a ton of bricks when we went through the Children's Memorial of all the children that died.  When you first walk in, they have pictures of these precious young children ages 3-9 years old.  As soon as I saw a picture of a little girl that looked to be between 5 or 6 with a darling smile and cute little cheeks, I immediately thought of my little sister Victoria.  Thinking of her made it so much more personal.  I cannot imagine having to watch sweet little Victoria have to live through something like that.  Thinking of someone else's little Victoria suffering from starvation, cold, murder, sickness, and hatred makes my heart ache.  No child so sweet and perfect should ever have to experience anything that even remotely resembles that; but hundreds of thousands of little Victorias did suffer and die.

Standing outside the entrance to the Children's Memorial.  The broken-pillars/columns are meant to symbolize the children's lives that were cut short.

After walking through the room with pictures, we were led into this pitch-black room that had tons of these lights, each representing a life.  As we walked through, holding on to the hand railing, there was audio that said names of some of the victims.

Here are some of the stories that were featured in the Museum:
A 13 year old girl (now an old woman)  hid in the coat closet with her older sister (age 17) when they heard some Nazis knocking on the door.  They heard their mom answer the door.  The Nazis her that they had to go. (Their mother and father.)  She then asked if she could grab her coat before they left. They answered yes.  Their mother opened the door and said, "Goodbye children."  Then she grabbed her coat, and shut the door.  They never saw their parents again.

A man was with his father on the outskirts of town by the synagogue.  His father was shot while he was standing right next to him merely because a German soldier thought that he was getting to close to the woods.
This same man was shipped to Auschwitz.  At the age of just 13, he had to pull gold teeth out of all of the dead bodies that came out of the gas chambers.  That's only one year older than my little brother, Austin.

There was one photograph on a wall that really struck me.  It depicted a mother hovering over her toddler in the middle of an empty hay field.  Behind her, a Nazi shoulder was aiming a rifle at she and her child.  I think this I remembered this picture because even on the brink of death, a mother will not leave her baby.  She was putting herself between her baby and the gun.  Even though they were both hopelessly doomed, she was still a protective mother.

Cool statue outside the exit of the Museum.  I'm not sure what it represents, but I interpreted it as God welcoming His children home.

Herzl's Tomb.  He led the battle to Israel gaining their own nation.

After the museum, we walked over to Mt. Herzl.  We laid on the grass while Ophir told us about Herzl.  I didn't really pay attention.  I was just happy to be laying on some grass. :)