Sunday November 3, 2013: The Old City
Sunday morning our tour guide, Raffi, was back. He reminded
us to make sure we had head coverings/hats for the walk through religious sites
later in the day.
Our first stop, though, was at an interesting community for
the elderly called Yad LakShish. It is not a residential senior citizen
community. It is a place of work for about 300 people who qualify – they are 65
or older and have only the Israeli government’s equivalent of welfare as income.
These are mostly people who made aliyah later in life (mostly Russian Jews in
their 50s and 60s), had difficulty learning Hebrew and finding jobs and
therefore had little or no opportunity to earn enough for retirement. The
community produces objects for sale in the gift shop; 20% of all sales goes
directly back to supporting the community. The workers receive a monthly
stipend that increases their government income by a third. They also receive a
hot lunch and snacks, as well as supplemented dental coverage (there is
universal health care in Israel, but it does not cover dental care).
Each person has a job to do – a person may trace designs for
silk scarves, others may paint the scarf, another may sew, etc. The end result
is a team effort to produce tallitot (prayer shawls), tallit bags, kippot,
scarves, menorahs, pillows, ceramic candlesticks, and many other items. All of
them beautifully and meticulously crafted as a team effort. Each workshop (e.g.
ceramics or silk screen) has a team lead who is a paid employee who has a
degree in fine art, and who is responsible for creating the designs that the
workers implement.
The average age of the workers is 78. The Yad Lakashish program gives them all
back their pride and dignity.
So we did our bit to help them – to start us off, we each
bought a beautiful tallit and then we just wandered around the shop and went a
little nuts. All for a good cause.
But the cashier process was a bit slow and flawed – all done
by hand, mistakes made…Andy stood in line for 15 minutes waiting for his turn,
with Raffi popping in every 2 minutes to check on the progress. Not that there
was anything we could do to move things along faster.
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| Samples of ceramics |
Onward to the Old City! On go the hats!
Our first stop in the Old City was the Davidson Center,
where we saw the current state of the excavation of the area continuing the
Kotel (the Western Wall) beyond it’s current configuration. We saw the platform
where the Women of the Wall hold their monthly Rosh Hodesh service and Raffi
talked about the plan to extend the platform so that it almost (but not quite)
reaches the Wall.
Up steps, down steps, up steps, down steps and we were
approaching the Kotel plaza checkpoint – separated into two lines by gender,
which made no sense since everybody reunites on the other side. Never mind.
A family celebrated a bar mitzvah on the men’s side. On the
women’s side, the boy’s female relatives stood on chairs and leaned over the
mechitzah (divider) to watch –I thought one woman in particular was about to
launch herself over the divider. Andy told me that there was plenty of room on
the men’s side. He also went into the tunnel from the men’s side and took
photos, since I can’t go in there.
On the women’s side, it was packed like a subway at rush
hour. The line up at the Wall was 3 or 4 deep. Women deep in prayer or
meditation, and they were NOT moving. I had to use my New York skills to wiggle
my way forward, inch by inch, step by step, until I was close enough to touch
the wall between two women who leaned against the wall with their forearms, and
their forehead on their arms. Dunno if they ever saw me, but they looked like
they were rooted to the spot.
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| Close up of the Kotel on the Women's side |
By now it was 11:55, and we were due to meet Raffi to walk
towards the Cardo and have lunch. While a few of us sat waiting by the meeting
spot, we got to experience a little of the “enthusiasm” of the ultra-orthodox,
when a Hasidic woman proceeded to lecture us on her feelings about
intermarriage. I’m paraphrasing here – her actual words were rather disturbing
and did not shed a good light on her community (to put it mildly).
Once we were all together, we trekked behind Raffi. Up
stairs, down stairs, up stairs, down stairs. Stairs, stairs, stairs, stairs.
There is one other person in our group who has at least as much trouble with
all the stair climbing – Sonya, who seems to have some problems with her
ankles. Eventually Raffi figured out that we needed to stop to let Sonya catch
up and maybe sit for a while. Nobody complained about the rest stops.
At some point, Raffi made a sudden left turn, walked us a
couple of hundred yards (he said it would be 50 feet – we discovered that
Raffi’s sense of time and distance leaves something to be desired) and then
stopped to collect everybody. Oops. We were missing Bob and Harriet. Waited. No
Bob and Harriet. Uh oh. Raffi ran to go look for them and came back empty
handed.
He escorted us to a spot with some lunch places, while he
went in search of Bob and Harriet. No luck. As a group we decided to meet at
2:45 before continuing on to the Hurva Synagogue.
Magically, Bob and Harriet found us again – they had been
studying their map (trying to follow our trail) and when they had looked up, we
had made that left turn with no trace.
We were scheduled to tour the Hurva synagogue at 4:00,
so we wandered up stairs and down
stairs until then we reached remnants of the walls of the 1st and 2nd
temples. Raffi launched into a long recitation of a portion of the book of
Isaiah – I think to show how it reflected what was known as factual history and
how the wall remnants we saw fit into it. But it went on for too long and I
could tell we all hand let our minds wander.
We weren’t allowed into the Hurva synagogue’s sanctuary, as
there were people in there studying Torah. But we were able to sit in the
women’s gallery (upstairs, of course – but by elevator!). The Hurva guide
explained the history of the synagogue and its destruction in 1948 and its
rebirth since 2011. Then one more flight up and outside – to see yet another
flight of stairs up (a spiral staircase with one banister and iron work steps
(my walking stick would not work here)) to the top. I deferred to the trip up
to the top; Andy took lots of photos.
When the group came down from the top, they suddenly
disappeared down the stairs without telling the 3 of us who had taken the
elevator up which floor to go down to. So. We went to the lobby. Where we stood
for about 5 minutes, until we were asked to leave because the building was
closing. But we had no idea where the group was (2nd time in one day
that Raffi had lost people). One guy had told us to make “a left and a left” to
find the real exit of the building, but Sonya couldn’t walk much further.
Fortunately the group popped up from around the corner.
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| Bima in the Hurva Synagogue |
This was the time we were supposed to go back to the bus and
back to the hotel, but a bunch of us stayed behind so we could spend more time
shopping in the Cardo, then have dinner, and then maybe go back to Ben Yehuda
Street – this being our last night in Jerusalem. The Halikmans kindly offered
to take all of our stuff that was on the bus back to their room and hang onto
it till we returned.
Of course, as soon as we left the group we immediately
became disoriented and could not find our way back to the Cardo. Thank goodness
it only took two or three or four wrong turns before we finally found our way
back.
We were immediately drawn to an artist’s gallery (what a
surprise). And of course, we bought something. Fortunately, it will fit in a
suitcase.
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| No, this isn't the artwork we bought. But the painting is of that cat |
After exhausting the Cardo, four of us took a cab over to
Ben Yehuda St. We shopped for a bit, had dinner, shopped some more, had gelato,
then called it a night. All in all, a wonderful day.
Tomorrow: The Dead Sea
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