Israel Museum

The Israel Museum is amazing. We were there from open to close (7 hours) and it still was not enough to see everything. We saw:

- The special exhibition on Herod. In the 1970's, archeologists discovered the site of Herod's final palace and burial place just south of Jerusalem (in what is now the West Bank). Excavations continued until the lead archeologist died from a fall at the site a few years ago. Some elements of the site were brought to the Israel museum and reconstructed there (including his mausoleum - one of Jonah's favorites of the day) - evidently there was some controversy as the Palestinian Authority objected to Israel removing relics from their territory.

- The archeology wing - one of our favorites was a cylinder from 586 BCE with a cuneiform inscription on it. The inscription described an archeological find made by Nebuchadnezzar II's people when they conquered Jerusalem (i.e., ancient inscriptions on a temple from 1700 years earlier). Meta-archeology :)

Italian Synagogue

- The Jewish life and culture wing - a highlight here was the rooms where 4 synagogues from around the world (Germany, Italy, India, and a Dutch style synagogue from Suriname) had been reconstructed.

Suriname Synagogue (with a sand floor)

- The scale model of Jerusalem at the time of the Second temple. Originally built by the owner of the Holyland Hotel, this 1:50 scale model was moved a few years ago to the Israel Museum. Incredible detail and scope.

- The Shrine of the Book. This funky building houses the Dead Sea Scrolls -- a collection of scrolls found in the 40's and 50's in caves in Qumran (near the Dead Sea - also now in the West Bank. I wonder what will happen to future Jewish archeological treasures yet to be found in the areas that are now under Palestinian control...). The top of the building is designed to look like the tops of the clay containers in which the scrolls were found. The scrolls were written by the Essenes, a splinter group of Jews from the 1st century CE (a very strict, monastic group). One scroll is the entire book of Isaiah, and fragments
of every book of the current Jewish Bible have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, except for the book of Esther. Other scrolls include books that were not ultimately included in the Bible, and still others describe the Essene's code of conduct and their vision of the end of days (a massive war between the sons of light [them] and the sons of dark [everyone else]). It was especially cool to see how they used the writings of Josephus (a historian who lived and wrote at the same time as the Essenes), archeological finds, and the contents of the scrolls to come to an understanding of the history of the time and place. In the same building as the scrolls was a great exhibit on the Aleppo Codex. Written in the 10th century, it is a codification of the Jewish Bible as it is currently used. Until the Dead Sea scrolls were found, it was the oldest known version of most of the texts of the Hebrew Bible. The codex itself has an interesting recent history - it had been in Aleppo, Syria since the 14th century, but in 1947 rioters in Syria, angry over the declaration of a Jewish State, burned the synagogue where the codex was housed.  It was lost for over a decade until it was smuggled into Israel by a Syrian Jew and given to the State.


- The iconic Ahava sculpture. The kids loved climbing on it!

- The Youth wing. They had an amazing exhibit on optical illusions. The coolest was an elevator that you went into and shut the doors and although the elevator stayed still, the images on the walls moved and took you from the subterranean basement garage of a building through about 40 stories to the roof of the building. The visual images created a real sensation of movement!

Two thumbs up for this awesome museum! Favorite new Israeli food of the day: bourekas (cheese and potato varieties). A hit with everyone. Interesting note: a new ruling just came out a week or two ago that in order to receive kosher certification, dairy bourekas must be crescent shapes and parve bourekas must be triangular, so that people who keep kosher will not accidentally eat a dairy pastry after after eating meat. The Orthodox Rabbinate in Israel really knows no bounds!