Israel - Week Two

Time is already going fast! We’ve already been here two weeks! On Sunday we visited the Biblical Zoo, a beautiful park that is over 250 dunams large (62 acres) and includes a lake and reservoir. The main idea of the zoo is to preserve rare and endangered animals with a special emphasis on the animals mentioned in the Bible. We enjoyed wandering down the beautiful terraced pathways and seeing the animals in very large habitats, and saw many animals that are rare and endangered, including red pandas, vultures, and ibex.

After our zoo day we hopped on a bus and spent a wonderful afternoon with Cyrelle Simon in her home in the Bayit Vagan neighborhood. Cyrelle made aliyah 3 years ago after living in West Lafayette for over 40 years, and lives in a lovely community where she and her family had spent many sabbaticals and summers over the years. Consequently, she already had a community of friends to come to when she moved here. It was wonderful to catch up with her and to hear all about what she is doing - she continues to play with music groups here in Jerusalem as she had with the Lafayette Klezmorim, and goes to an ulpan twice weekly where her group is reading Israeli authors. She also has quite a busy social schedule, with her neighbors and friends and with her children and grandchildren that live here and abroad. If you get the shul (Sons of Abraham) bulletin you can hear more in her frequent letters. I enjoyed hearing and sharing the news about the many connections we have in common - it really is a small Jewish world!

We rounded out our week with two different swimming experiences - Yam HaMelach, the Dead Sea; and Breichat Yerushalayim - the Jerusalem Pool. About a 45 minute ride from our apartment, that quickly descends down to the lowest point on earth, and not far from where the scrolls of Qumran were discovered, we spent the day on a quiet beach at the Dead Sea. The beach was beautiful! The kids loved floating in the calm, warm, salty water and then standing in a freshwater shower that Rachel called the tree water since it was piped in next to a palm. Our fellow beachgoers showed us how to dig in the shallows for the mud and soon we were covered in the stuff! We enjoyed a delicous beachside meal overlooking the sea. It was a great day!!

On a not so side note, since my experience of Israel is that it’s where people come together, and a frequent experience is running into friends you didn’t expect to see, it truly is a small world. A little over two years ago, as part of a program through Purdue - the Indiana Center for Cultural Exchange - our congregation hosted a group of Muslim leaders from the Southeast Asia - Thailand and the Phillipines, who came to see our synagogue and meet with a small group of us to learn more about Jews and Judaism. For most of them, this was their first experience meeting Jews, and I was the first rabbi they had ever met. We exchanged contact info and email addresses. On the morning that we woke up to go to the Dead Sea, I checked my Facebook page and saw that one of my friends from this group, Musa, was also going to the Dead Sea that day and that he was on a tour of the Holy Land and had been in the Old City the day before! We didn’t meet up at the Dead Sea since his tour went floating at a different spot than the quiet beach we went to.

The Jerusalem Pool was also great fun! Located off of Emek Refaim, about a 20 minute walk from our apartment, the entrance is hidden - you have to enter through the supermarket entrance. Once inside, it has a great kids pool, a very shallow baby pool, and a great water slide that the boys went down too many times to count. There is also a lap pool for serious swimming. Even though our kids don’t speak much Hebrew and the kids their age didn’t speak much English, they still had a great time together in the water. It was a wonderful way to cool off on a hot day!