West meets East

I'm still processing the main contrasting things that we saw and experienced during this, probably typical, Jerusalem day, so I'll just report the things that stood out to me and others can draw their own conclusions.

I have to start with last night...after the kids went to bed, Abe and I walked down to the Inbal Hotel to meet up with Michael Ungar (a former Rabbi of B'nai Israel Toledo -- our trip so far has covered quite a few current and past B'nai Israel clergy!) who is here with a group of families mostly from Cleveland. He came back from shabbat dinner shortly after we arrived and we had a nice time catching up in the lobby of the Inbal. We also met his wife and step daughter (who is 13). Toward the end of the evening, knowing she lives in Cleveland, I asked his step daughter, Rachel, if she knows any kids who go to Camp Wise. She lit up and told me, "I go to Camp Wise." From there, it was just a matter of moments to discover that she and Ella are great camp friends! So, of course we made plans to meet up with them the next day (in the afternoon) with our kids. Small world!

The light rail tracks running along the Old City walls by
the New Gate

Damascus Gate - Abe reports that this was a MUCH worse
neighborhood in the 90's (I never went)

So, we looked needed to find something to do on Shabbat morning (none of us felt like going to synagogue) relatively close to home, so we could meet up with them at the hotel in the afternoon. We decided on the Rockefeller Museum of Archeology. Neither Abe nor I had been there before -- in part because of its location in East Jerusalem (just outside Herod's gate of the Old City).  But, our impression (which was confirmed) was that this neighborhood, while still mostly inhabited by an Arab population, was a lot safer than it used to be,  and we had heard (also confirmed) that the museum housed an excellent collection of antiquities) so we decided to give it a try. To me, the walk through a very small part of East Jerusalem was the most interesting part of the day. It was like entering another country. The infrastructure is all Israeli, of course. So, the light rail runs through part of the neighborhood. The Israel Post office and police station have  a huge presence along the street (tall buildings with big logos). It's almost as if the government wants to make sure that the residents don't forget who sends their letters and protects their streets. The signs on the stores do not have any Hebrew on them. Mostly Arabic, a little bit of English. Ella was among the few females without her head covered (I was wearing a sunhat), and although we felt safe, we also stayed closer together to one another than usual and tried to look American instead of Jewish. I saw a father meet up with with his family. He took their 2 year old daughter out of his wife's arms to help her, and then walked down the sidewalk kissing his daughter's palm tenderly.

East Jerusalem

The museum, built during the British Mandate period, and bearing the tag line "West meets East", was every bit as interesting as we expected it to be. It was arranged chronologically, and although the exhibits were fairly old school (artifacts in cases, or in some cases just laid out, each with a number, sometimes corresponding to a sign with a brief description) that had some amazing things, and it was easy to trace the history of the land through its objects. From the period when both Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens were thought to live in the same place,

Celebrating the found paci!

and to carve tools out of stone, and to bury their dead for the first time, through the bronze age and the iron age, including the time of the Egyptians (they had incredible, intact stele and other artifacts from this time period), the Greeks, the Christians (they had the original lintels from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher), the Muslims (they had parts of the original Al-Aqsa mosque building), We had a brief panic moment towards the end of our visit, when we discovered that Sylvia had lost her pacifier somewhere along the way, and we hurried back through over 100,000 years of history looking for it (we found it!). We picnicked in the lovely courtyard in the center of the building, from there we could heard the call of the muezzin to prayer and we could marvel at more incredible antiquities that were displayed in and around the courtyard exposed to the elements and the inquisitive touch of visitors.

Olive trees on the way home

We decided to walk back through the Old City - a longer but very interesting route, mostly through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, which of course, despite being Saturday, was very lively and crowded. We left the Old City via Jaffa Gate and walked through the ultra high end (but closed on Shabbat) Mamilla Mall. We also walked past the David Citadel Hotel, which had a huge banner out front announcing that the "So and So family welcomes you to Israel 2013 David's Ultimate Bar Mitzvah" but the B was crossed out and replaced with a C making it a "Car mitzvah" and there was a big BMW logo in the middle -- about which Jonah noted the irony of choosing a German brand of car for this purpose.

So much fun at the pool... but could this possibly be less than
2 miles from where we were this morning?

We came home, changed into bathing suits to meet up with Rachel and her family at the pool at the Inbal. Ella was of course, thrilled to see her friend! We got onto the elevator to go down to the pool, and some other (excessively well dressed) hotel guests - two women with two kids - got on too. We pushed for our floor and then one of the women said to her friend, "Isn't this the Shabbat elevator?" (the one that stops on every floor so you don't have to break the rules of the sabbath by pushing a button for your floor) and one of the kids told her "no, I think that's the other one." But, they made no move to get out, so finally, I asked them which floor they wanted, and pushed the button for them. We went down to the pool level and after, I must say, some pretty good negotiating on our part about the guest fees for the Inbal pool, we spent a wonderful 3 hours connecting with Michael and Michelle and Rachel, and enjoying the pool. Sylvia, who is desperately missing her bathtub at home, stayed in the water for 3 hours straight, until her lips were blue and she was shivering. But, she had a great time! (On a related note, Sylvia has a second Hebrew word "ambatiya" which means bathtub - from her favorite book of a little series we got for the kids to practice their Hebrew. The book is called "Tzipi ba'ambatiya" (Tzipi in the bath) and is a bit of wish fulfillment for Sylvia who would like to spend more time in water than her current circumstances allow)