Jerusalem day 3

Tour day 7 - 3rd April

This was a museum day, and museums are not my favourite places to spend long hours, not to mention “museum feet” which seems to happen to me with all that slow walking around. I can walk the streets for kilometres on any day, but walking around museums is a different animal. It’s not a natural way to walk and my feet ache!! However, all that aside, the three museums we visited were really interesting and worthwhile.

First up was the Friends of Zion museum, an interactive visit that helped us to appreciate the struggle of the Jewish people in returning to what they see as their homeland. The museum paid homage to the non-Jewish people around the world who have considered it their mission to help Jews return to Israel - Queen Victoria (I know, I was surprised too), Winston Churchill, Oscar Schindler (think “Schindler’s List”), Corrie Ten Boom’s grandparents, among others.

It was cleverly done, with each display of light and sound aimed at a sculpture, and triggered by the participant standing in a particular location, from which they would then watch and listen.

Of course, the museum also paid tribute to the survivors of the holocaust.

Next stop was the Israeli Museum, where we got to view an enormous model (1:50) of Jerusalem in the second temple era. How accurate the model is remains to be seen, as archeological evidence continues to surface and new things are learned every day, but it certainly made for an interesting hour or so as we wandered around this large model.

Also at this museum is the Shrine of the Book, a repository for the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex. It was gob-smacking to see some of the original parchments discovered in Qumran where we had visited only days ago. No photos allowed inside this building, but the roof is an impressive white dome with fountains spraying over it, and represents the “light” and purity of the Word.

Last museum for the day was the sobering and moving Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre. An overwhelmingly powerful display documenting the barbaric treatment of the Jews during the Second World War. It was a difficult museum for our guide Yakov to talk about with us, as his grandfather died during the Holocaust.

The museum building is unique, shaped like a long A-frame so it looks like a big Toblerone on the side of the mountain. You progress in a zig-zag through the rooms, and there is no way to skip any of the areas, so after a while it does become a case of information overload. But nevertheless it's very moving, particularly the video snippets interviewing holocaust survivors, who had been children at the time, ripped away from their parents and left to fend for themselves. I’ve visited Dachau concentration camp which was grim and sobering, but the human stories at this museum made it much more so.

When you finally get to the exit there is a lovely terrace with a view over the valley and the hillside areas of Jerusalem in the distance. Yakov told us that he lives on the distant hill, and whenever he comes out of the museum looking towards this hill, he feels a sense of victory that the Nazis did not have the final victory over the Jewish people.

Yad Vashem also has a separate Hall of Remembrance, with an eternal flame burning above the names of all the concentration camps.

There is also a separate Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem, hollowed out from an underground cavern, and built in honour of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered during the holocaust. It was designed by architect Moshe Safdie, and built with the generous donation of Abe and Edita Spiegel, whose son Uziel was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of two and a half.

Yakov said that the children were considered much more dispensable. What a horrible thought. When you enter this building, it is dark and the only light comes from many small memorial candles reflected infinitely in mirrored walls, the overall effect being like walking through a sea of stars. The names and ages of all the children murdered in the holocaust are intoned slowly and endlessly as you walk through the darkness. It’s beautiful and very impacting and left me feeling quite emotional.

Yakov spoke to us briefly as we emerged, and became teary as he talked about the genocide from the perspective of one who was so personally connected. The terrace nearby was dedicated in honour of a Jewish couple, survivors of the holocaust, and the inscription reads:

They saw a world in which one and a half million Jewish children were murdered and they survived to witness the birth of the state of Israel and millions of Jewish children.  

A little further on is a sculpture honouring Janusz Korczak and the Warsaw ghetto’s orphans. He refused sanctuary repeatedly, choosing to stay at the orphanage of which he was a director, and when the entire institution was sent to Treblinka, he went too and perished along with the children.

Our museums done, the rest of the day was ours, so we decided to explore the area around our hotel. We walked through a park and found ourselves in a pretty street with galleries, then on to an upmarket shopping mall. We enjoyed a busker or two, then wandered on.

At the end of the mall the stairs led up to the Old City, so we wandered for a while through the market alleyways, taking in one last look at this fascinating place, and then headed out again through the Jaffa Gate and back to our hotel to pack and have dinner.

Sadly, our time in Israel had come to an end. An early morning flight to Turkey was in store for us the following day.