New Jerusalem

I really love the Old City of Jerusalem. It's got a frenetic pace, especially in the souq area, and it's also got cool hostory around every corner. I figured I wouldn't be doing the city justice unless I got outside the walls and saw what the modern city of Jerusalem had to offer.

I headed west until I came to a large park, which had the really cool looking Monestary of the Cross in the valley. This Greek Orthodox shrine is from the 1000s AD, and according to the guidebooks, would be a major tourist attraction in any other city. Alas, in Jerusalem, it sits mostly forgotten because it is far away from the Old City and in a remote valley where it is hard to get to. I would have visited the inside, but it was Sunday and it was closed.

One of my main goal in walking this far was to visit two of Jerusalem's finest museums, the Bible Lands Museum and The Israel Museum (pictured above). The Bible Lands Museum was very good, if not a bit sterile in it's presentation. It had artifacts dating back as far as 6000 BC, and had them displayed by time period in an easy to follow layout.

The Israel Museum, much to my chagrin, was mostly closed for renovations. The two things that were open, however, were the two reasons I had wanted to visit. the first was a scale model of the Old City from the Second Temple Period, around the time of Christ. The admission fee included a handheld audio device that allowed you to type in numbers and get explanations as to what you were looking at. I really enjoyed this, and it put the ancient city in perspective. Even though I love wandering the streets of the Old City, seeing it in this type of layout gave me an appreciation as a geography geek of how the city must have looked back then.

The second part of the Israel Museum that remained open was The Shrine of The Book. This is the specially climate controlled wing where The Dead Sea Scrolls are kept. Discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd boy who was searching for a lost sheep, the scrolls are the best known artifact known pertaining to the Old Testament and how the books were selected. My only disappointment in this was that the actual bible scrolls were not on display, instead there were reproductions. They were many of the original scrolls on display, but most were from books that had not made it into the Bible. I'll be visiting the site where the scrolls were discovered (Qumran) later in this trip.

I was going to visit the Israeli government building, known as the Knesset, but when I showed up there were only two tours scheduled, one in Hebrew and one in German. My high school German is long forgotten (and was never good enough to follow along on a tour like this) and my Hebrew skills leave a lot to be desired, so I settled for a picture from the exterior and moved on.

My next stop was at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial and museum. I'd read a real good article before I'd left criticizing Yad Vashem for it's politicizing of the Holocaust. It's true, the way things are phrased and presented do have a definite bias, but unlike the authors of the article, I'm not ready to let that define my visit. The Holocaust is something that for those of us who aren't Jewish will ever be able to grasp as deeply as they do. The museum was sad and gripping, laid out in an historical order that was easy to follow. Like The Israel Museum, Yad Vashem had a handheld audio guide that was available for 30 Shekels (about $8) and added to the experience.

The were no pictures allowed inside, but I did snap the one above of the shoes that were taken from victims right before they were gassed at Auchwitz. I saw displays upon displays full of these things (suitcases, shoes, false teeth, even human hair) when I visited Auchwitz in 1999. Seeing this again brought back memories of that sobering experience.

Outside the museum portion, was The Avenue of Righteous Gentiles, a pretty walkway with trees planted for many of the people who had risked their lives during this awful period to save the lives of Jews.

My final stop of the day was at the Mahane Yehuda Market, or shuk. This is the market where Israelis go to buy their meat, spices, produce and vegetables. It was much less touristy and much more functional than the souq, the Muslim market in the Old City where I was staying. the biggest difference was that no of the stall owners tried to talk me into buying things that I did not need, the thing I hate most about the touristy souq. I picked up some pitas, hommus, olives and grapes and had a nice little lunch, all for about $5. After leaving the market I walked back to my hotel through modern Jerusalem, which was, to put it as nicely as possible, uninspiring. More about that in my Jerusalem summary post.

I had one more day in Jerusalem, but it wasn't going to be spent there- I was going to the West Bank, something I'd thought about everyday since I decided to do this trip, and it was quite an experience.