March 12, 2008 (journal)
With the GYI Summit ending the evening before, it was now time to begin the 5-day Post-Conference Study Tour of Israel. It turned out that my roommate Nicky would also be on the same bus (#4 of 5 altogether) and that we also would be roommates in our hotel at the Dead Sea!
As we left the Regency hotel in Jerusalem, we didn’t leave Jerusalem itself just yet as our first stop was at ‘Yad Vashem’, the Holocaust Museum. The Holocaust left such an indelible mark on the Jewish people that the nation of Israel even created a law that such a museum would have to be constructed in remembrance of this incredibly great tragedy. Yad Vashem actually has a few different elements to it.
The first thing that was pointed out to us was a number of trees on the site with plaques next to them honoring 22,111 Gentiles (Oskar Schindler is one) who had something to do with helping Jews escape the Holocaust. We then headed into a hall of remembrance for the 1,100,000 children ages 1 hour to 18 years that died. We walked through a room of darkness, candles and mirrors and as we walked through, names, ages and countries of these young victims were read, echoing through the room. Just as I was about to exit the room, I heard the name of a child who was 9 years old and immediately my thoughts went to Kameron as tears came to my eyes. The horrors of the Holocaust being inflicted on innocent children is too much to take….
With the GYI Summit ending the evening before, it was now time to begin the 5-day Post-Conference Study Tour of Israel. It turned out that my roommate Nicky would also be on the same bus (#4 of 5 altogether) and that we also would be roommates in our hotel at the Dead Sea!
As we left the Regency hotel in Jerusalem, we didn’t leave Jerusalem itself just yet as our first stop was at ‘Yad Vashem’, the Holocaust Museum. The Holocaust left such an indelible mark on the Jewish people that the nation of Israel even created a law that such a museum would have to be constructed in remembrance of this incredibly great tragedy. Yad Vashem actually has a few different elements to it.
The first thing that was pointed out to us was a number of trees on the site with plaques next to them honoring 22,111 Gentiles (Oskar Schindler is one) who had something to do with helping Jews escape the Holocaust. We then headed into a hall of remembrance for the 1,100,000 children ages 1 hour to 18 years that died. We walked through a room of darkness, candles and mirrors and as we walked through, names, ages and countries of these young victims were read, echoing through the room. Just as I was about to exit the room, I heard the name of a child who was 9 years old and immediately my thoughts went to Kameron as tears came to my eyes. The horrors of the Holocaust being inflicted on innocent children is too much to take….
At the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, our guide shares about this sculpture depicting Janusz Korczak, who tried unsuccessfully to save the children of his Warsaw orphanage.
After this we spent 1 ½ hours in the museum itself. It is not only an incredibly well done factual experience explaining all of the factors over many years that led to the Holocaust but there are also repeated video testimonies scattered throughout the museum experience where now older Jewish men and women tell their stories of horror and escape; most of them recalling for the first time these horrific experiences from their childhood. It’s hard to explain the impact this all has on you because it doesn’t seem that it could possibly be real somehow and that it could have happened within the past 70 years. It also forces me to come face to face with my own German heritage and the fact that this happened at the hands of German people; a few people in the group asked me how it all made me feel in light of that….sobering to say the least.
At Yad Vashem, a remembrance room that has the names of each of the death camps tiled into the floor.
From Yad Vashem we headed to a shopping mall with a food court (we had stopped there in the previous week as well) and went to a Falafel stand; it’s pretty good stuff! After lunch, we stopped at an incredible community that basically lived underground and we walked through the tunnels/caves which had been below their homes. The rock in that area is so soft that it is quite easy to scrape away and these people carved out an immense existence underground.
An ancient underground community in the south of Israel; birds were kept in these holes and their waste used for fertilizer.
We then started to head south to the Dead Sea passing through the Valley of Elah where the confrontation of David and Goliath took place; we even had a couple people on the bus act it out as it was read! Shortly after this, we began our descent of over 500 meters to our hotel on the shores of the Dead Sea; a really nice place with a spa, Jacuzzis and even a Dead Sea water pool.
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