A Day of Emotions

This month in Israel has been a different sort of experience for me. I have, in the past, ridden on tour buses and visited various tourist sites. I have been in the Dead, the Red, the Med, and the Kinneret. I have ascended to Jerusalem and heard the story of Avram and Melchizedek (Genesis 14:8) and eaten bread and wine at the Montefiore Windmill. I have hiked through the desert, and I have sat in awe at the Hall of Independence. And I have loved every minute.

Don't get me wrong--I have my favorites...walking along King George or Emek Refaim, Marzipan rugelach, meandering through the streets of the Old City, a moment of uninterrupted prayer at the Kotel...and I'm making sure that I get my fill of these areas.

This time, however, I wanted new experiences. Certainly, being in an apartment for a month--rather than living out of a suitcase and spending part of each day moving from site to site--has given me a different look at Israel. As I stated yesterday, one of my favorite parts of being in Israel is walking around, people-watching, etc. This is part of what led me to last Friday's tefillah experience. It's why I enjoy wandering through Machaneh Yehuda as I search for the perfect vegetables, nuts, and fruits.

This morning, I had the pleasure and privilege of viewing an experience that was both new to me and the very opposite of touristy. Two of my friends were on a Nefesh B'Nefesh aliyah flight, and they landed at Ben-Gurion Airport this morning. Thanks to the magic of modern technology, I was able to watch a live streaming webcast of the festivities. In fact, from the comfort of our kitchen table, my roommates and I were able to watch more than 220 new olim (immigrants to Israel) descend from the chartered plane, kiss the ground, and board buses to Terminal One.

Upon arrival at the terminal (remember the doors with Welcome to Israel/ברוּכים הבאים לישראל posted above?), the olim were greeted by and walked between two lines of soldiers waving Israeli flags. One man said, "I got onto the plane as an American, and I walked onto the tarmac (here) as an Israeli." They continued into the terminal, where guests were waiting, and after a great deal of hugging, kissing, and shmoozing, the welcoming ceremony began. Many dignitaries filed forward to make their speeches; their words came straight from their hearts, and their universal message was "Welcome Home." The cameras scanned the audience throughout the ceremony. Watching all of these people...men, women, children, babies, senior citizens, singles, marrieds, families, etc. ...just reminded me of last night's journal extolling the beautiful people of Israel. As of this morning, we have more than 220 new beautiful people who are card-carrying citizens of the State of Israel.

I was moved to tears at many points in this live webcast, and I was awed by the power of the experience--and I was only watching it online! In case you have a particular question in mind for me, the answer is no. For a number of reasons, I do not believe aliyah is the right choice for me. However, that does not in any way mitigate my great respect and admiration for those who have made this great, Jewish, Zionist choice.

If you're curious, yes, I did see both Eric and Annette on the webcast--many times each.

I thought this would be the end of tonight's post, but after classes were over today, my roommates and I took a cab to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial. Although I have been to Yad Vashem a few times before, a new museum has been built there, and I wanted to see it, along with the other memorials across its campus. We headed first to the Children's Memorial, where we entered a cave-like structure, inside of which several candles are lit and reflected through mirrors to appear 1.5 million times, since that is the number of children who were killed in the Holocaust. While you walk through the dark and look at the reflections, which appear like stars in the sky, names of children are read, along with their ages and native countries. Afterward, we walked through the Children's Garden, which was filled with a stunning quiet, a silence that practically pleaded for the bustle of laughter, chatting, and other exhibitions of noise by beloved children.

The new Holocaust History Museum is incredible. Its major tool of communication is the words of those who died and those who survived; this testimony is delivered in both written and oral form. The video testimonies of survivors were particularly poignant to me because they were almost all recorded in Hebrew. While I have studied the Holocaust extensively, it was incredibly different to see and hear the responses of people who went from Europe to Israel rather than to the States. The museum was filled with an incredible yet coherent cacophony of voices of witness--yet the audio is wired in such a way that you hear only what you are meant to hear, while never quite losing the voices in the background.

One of the most remarkable rooms in the museum was the Hall of Names, which contains more than two million pages of testimony about Holocaust victims. The museum has room on its shelves--which are visible in the Hall--for six million pages of testimony...but of course, many will never be completed, so those shelves will always remain empty.

At the end of the main exhibit, the focus shifts to survivors moving forward, leaving Europe, highlighting those who made aliyah to the Land of Israel before it was a State, and of course, the founding of the State of Israel. This was especially poignant given the continued aliyah, as I witnessed just this morning.

To Eric and Annette, ברוּכים הבאים הביתה, welcome home.

We'll talk soon...
Caroline

P.S. Pictures of last week's pre-Shabbat adventures with Stephanie have been posted on Facebook.