DAY  12
Monday, 18 January
After an early breakfast, we loaded our things onto the bus.The sky is blue and clear, but everything is still wet from the rain. I pause for one last cigarette on the balcony, and am relieved to see Spot.

On the bus we have morning prayer. It was nice, except that they chose the song, “Sing A New Church;” being content with the Church founded by Christ, I sit that one out. We drive through several storms, relieved intermittently by patches of pure blue, but for the most part the landscape is shrouded in mist and rain.

Arriving in Tel Aviv, we go to the Diaspora Museum. The Museum focuses on the period of time beginning with 70 A.D.—the year of the destruction of the Second Temple, and the year which marks the beginning of the Diaspora. It is built around the themes of family, community, faith, culture among the nations and return. All objects in the Museum are replicas because, as our guide explains to us, this is not a collection of Judaica, but rather a place to tell a story.

Next to some Herodian stones stands a stone relief of the Romans carrying the Menorah out of the Temple—the piece is in reality a replica of the arch of Titus in Rome. At the end of the long stone processional march the Jews, now slaves of Rome. The real Menorah taken by the Romans has been lost, but it holds tremendous symbolic meaning, since the Temple was the social, political and religious center of Judaism. Jewish life without the Temple was inconceivable. Our guide tells us that the main question addressed by the Diaspora Museum is how did the people survive without the land and the Temple?

Passing photographs of the faces of people of all ages from over 120 countries, we come to an exhibit on the cycle of individual life and the holiday cycle, which converge to be the moments when families are joined together. We view a slide show of Jewish homes from all centuries and countries. They look different, but in all of them some of the same objects are present: the mezuzah, candles, bread, a prayer book, an eternal light hanging from the ceiling in remembrance of the one in the Temple, a spice box used for havdalah. There are several exhibits based on the various holidays and holy days, including the Day of Remembrance, fixed in 1953 by the Knesset. On the Day of Remembrance, sirens sound throughout the country at 10:00 A.M., and the entire nation observes two minutes of complete silence when everything (including cars on the highway) stops. At the end of this set of displays is a menorah dedicated to all Jewish victims in all times and places. In the center of the menorah is the Light of Hope. Behind it is a plaque bearing the inscription, “In the year nineteen hundred and thirty four of the Christian era, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. The Germans and their accomplices murdered six million Jews, among them one million and a half Jewish children. Imprisoned in ghettos, the victims fought desperately for their lives while the world watched in silence.” I was fascinated by what I had learned so far at the Museum, and deeply moved by the tributes to those Jews killed in the Holocaust, but found my experience slightly tainted by the pointed use of the phrase “the Christian era” in the inscription. Elsewhere, great pains are taken to eliminate terms like A.D. and B.C.; it seems that it is only acceptable to mention Christianity if you mention Adlof Hitler in the same breath.

The next area contains a sculpture of Jewish men waiting for the tenth man to complete the minyan. Ten are required because in the Bible, Moses managed to get God down to ten good men when God was ready to destroy Sodom and Gemorrah. After that we see an authentic Torah scroll, 250 years old, from Morocco. It is damaged, and so can be put on display; people can turn their backs to it, etc… because it cannot be used in services anymore. All Jewish cemeteries, we are told, have a place reserved for the burial of Torah scrolls and mezuzah that are no longer usable.

We move on to a section that contains models of synagogues from different places and times. Featured is a model of a synagogue from Toledo. Called the synagogue of Saint Mary, it was a synagogue that was converted into a Church. Built in the 1200’s, the synagogue contains Islamic architecture due to the Moorish influence in Spain at the time. Next is a model of a Sephardic synagogue from 17th century Morocco. It has blue window panes—the color meant to keep out evil in Islamic tradition. It is decorated as well with the design of a hand called a hamsa—Arabic for “five” (the Hebrew is hamesch)—this design refers to Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima, whom tradition depicts as holding her hand out to protect the people. There is also a model of an Ashkenazi synagogue from Poland with pews (similar to those found in Christian churches) facing Jerusalem. The word mizrach means “east;” a traditional Jewish home may have a mizrach plate fixed on its eastern wall. We see also an orthodox model with a separate balcony for women. The Hebrew for synagogue, our guide explains, is Bet Knesset, which means “place to meet.” In Yemen, the Jewish community was very poor; they had only one prayer book which they placed in the center so that all could stand around it and read. From childhood, Yemenite Jews had to read the scriptures and prayers from all angles; to this day, you can give an old Yemenite an Israeli newspaper and he will be able to read it upside down.  Finally, we see a model of the great Tlomackie Street Synagogue dedicated in 1878. An affluent and grand structure, it was destroyed by the Nazis on 16 May 1943, on the last day of the ghetto uprising.

Back on the bus, it rains and hails fiercely. We drive to the center of Tel Aviv for lunch. In the 1890’s Theodore Herzel wrote “Alte Neuland;” Tel Aviv takes its name from this book—Tel means “old;” Aviv means “spring.” We have shwarma at a falafel stand for lunch, then drive to Gymnazia Herzlizza, the second largest high school in Tel Aviv. Built in 1905, Gymnazia Herzlizza has a student body of 2,000. It is a non-religious school, and is the first where all subjects were taught in Hebrew; in fact, biology and physics teachers actually had to invent Hebrew words for some scientific terms.

We meet in the Remembrance Hall with a class of students, and then break up into small groups for discussion. The kids are bright, articulate and well-informed. They are also amazingly polite, though a bit passive. After a snack in another meeting room, we get back on the bus. It had rained ten minutes before, and the rain began again as soon as the bus door closed, but so far we have been able to walk more or less dry shod.

We arrive at Independence Hall. The photograph we see to the left is of the first Jewish Congress, held in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, and led by Theodore Herzel. The picture to the right is of the moment of the founding of Tel Aviv, the first Jewish city. We are standing on that exact spot now. 

It was Herzel who spearheaded the Zionist movement, saying, “Here I am going to launch my idea of the Jewish people joining a new Exodus." The Basel Program began the movement of returning to Israel to establish an independent Jewish state. Herzel wrote two books, “The Jewish State” and, in 1903,  “Alte Neuland” –a utopia. He died in 1904, and on 1 April 1909 Tel Aviv was established and named in Herzel’s honor. Tel Aviv’s main street is Herzel Street, and its main school Herzelizza. Tel Aviv was settled by lottery: sixty-six families bought 600,000 francs worth of land which they divided into sixty-six fields. The lottery was done with two piles of shells—one pile with family names and the other with plot numbers. A ten year-old boy then picked one shell from each pile until every family was matched up with a plot number. The families were then given one year and some money to build their homes. The names of the main streets in Tel Aviv are the names of the original sixty-six families. Independence Hall stands in plot number forty-three, drawn for the Diesenzoff family. In 1936, Independence Hall was built on the house the Diesenzoff family built in 1910. In 1936 the house became an art museum.

In 1947 the United Nations partitioned Palestine into three areas—one for Jews, one for Arabs, and one to serve as an international free zone around Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Britain had had a mandate here since the end of WWI when they defeated the Ottoman Turks, and had tried to block Jewish immigration. 1947 saw many Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors (often rejected by other nations) attempt to immigrate, but again, the British refused. On 29 November 1949 the UN partition offered 600 kilometers to the Jews, 60% of which was the Negev Desert. The plan was disputed, however, by the Arab leaders, who said that the Jews had enough space here, pointing to the Dead Sea. The Jews were an isolated 600,000 people surrounded by twenty-two Arab nations; war broke out in eight hours.

On 30 November 1947 a bus to Jerusalem was bombed. Seven Arab countries invaded, and the odds were bad: thirty to forty thousand Jewish kids against one and a half million well-trained and equipped Arab soldiers. George Marshall of the U.S State Department urged the Jews not to declare themselves a state, warning them that they would be destroyed by the Arabs and the U.S. would not help them. Truman differed, and urged the Jews to fight for independence, despite the fact that Marshall told him he would resign if Truman supported the Jewish claim for statehood. At this point, our guide told us the story of a soldier from West Point who visited Independence Hall and related the following incident: In his studies at West Point, they reviewed the history of war, but not a word was mentioned about Israel’s War of Independence. He asked his teacher, an old general, why, and the general answered, “I teach strategy and the reasons behind war, how they’re won and their rationales. I don’t teach miracles. And there is no other way to explain how forty thousand kids with sticks in their hands could defeat seven armies.” The fight for Jerusalem was the longest and hardest battle. The Jews needed to break a siege, and to do it they sent a battalion of three hundred kids, led by a young soldier named Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin won the city of Jerusalem twice—once in ‘48 and once in ‘67. Our guide told us that one kibbutz—one hundred and twenty boys and girls with faulty Czech rifles—stopped the whole Egyptian army.

15 May 1948 was the date agreed upon for the British to officially take their leave, ending thirty years of occupation, but that was Shabbat, so a declaration could not be signed on that day. Ben Gurion changed the declaration time to Friday right before Shabbat, thus founding the nation on the keeping of Halakhah.The room we are in was chosen for the declaration because it is a bomb shelter. Invitations were sent out one day before the event to 350 people. It was supposed to be top secret, but within three hours you could read the headlines in Tokyo. The room’s furniture was borrowed from cafés, and the walls were hung with pictures of Jews from every nation, so that all could be part of the event. In this room, we listened to the actual recording of Ben Gurion declaring that the state of Israel had been born, the thunderous applause at the word “Israel,” since for two thousand years it had been something else, the rabbi beside Ben Gurion, weeping with joy, rising to his feet to recite the Shehecheyanu: “We bless you, O Lord our God, that you have sustained us in being and kept us alive to see this great moment.” Golda Meier records in her memoirs that the rabbi’s blessing was not planned, but that it wasn’t until he said it that the people in the room realized what they were a part of. She records that she prayed that God would give her the strength to sign her name, and that she saw the rest of the evening through a veil of tears.
Independance Hall in Tel Aviv, where Israel was declared a state in May 1948. Israeli flags flank a photograph of Theodore Herzel.
We hear the original voices in the bomb shelter/Independence Hall, with the rain pounding on the high, small windows and the wind howling outside. When the rabbi finishes, the room breaks out into song—the Hatikva, Israel’s national anthem.

After a little over an hour on the bus, we arrive at King’s Hotel and check in. Dinner is at seven; tomorrow, we go to the West Bank.