America

I'm back in America and won't be blogging anymore. Thank you to all my fans; it was for you all that I made this blog.

Passover Break

In Israel the vacations are done by Jewish holidays so for Passover I had a little over a week off to do whatever I wanted. I decided to spend some of that time doing a three day hike. With a few friends, we went from just north a coastal city called Naharia and hiked all the way to the Kinerret. Sleeping in sleeping bags on the trails, my group spent about 14 hours a day hiking from sunup to sundown. At the end of the first day we noticed that we were running low on water since we hadn't had a chance to fill up since the night before. We looked at our map and realized that we were at a we had two options of how to get to the next part of the trail some 5 kilometers away. On the one hand we could have taken a few highways, but we could follow an unmarked path that would lead us to an old, dried up stream that would lead is to another old, dried up stream that would lead us to another unmarked path that would lead us to the next part of the trail. As sundown was rapidly approaching, we decided to take the later. We walked through a town called Ma'alot, picked up some water from a kindly woman we met on the street, and went on our way. That first night we slept on the rocky, dried up stream bed, but, because we were all so exhausted, we slept soundly. We awoke a little before dawn and began our day's journey. We followed our map as best as we could and lead us to 3 unidentifiable forks in the road. We guessed at each fork and only made one mistake. At the end of the third fork we thought we were very lost, but we decided to walk until we met someone or found something that could tell us where we were. We ended walking right to the next marked path of the trail. From there we continued on our journey; we hiked up and down Mount Mairon and ended up right by Tzfat and slept on some grassy trail from 8 PM - 2 AM. At 2 AM we woke up and began while it was still dark out. We got word the day before that it was going to be 115 degrees out in the heat of the day and you can't really hike in that heat. We hiked for about three hours in darkness and then continued till about 1 when we finally made it to the Kinerret. At that point it was so hot that some of us were getting heat rash. Swimming in the Kinerret cooled us down and we were exhausted but not overheating. We finished the hike with a fancy meal at some resturant in Tiveria and then took buses home and slept for 12 hours.
The next day I visited the Art Museum of Tel Aviv. There was an exhibit by some Israeli artist whose last or first name was Natan and there was a collection of paintings from Monet, Chagal, and a few other artists.
I finished the break with a Shabbas with my dad's cousins who have a flat in Jerusalem.

Crazy Adventure

I went on a hike a few days ago with my friend Eli. We decided to go about 7 PM on a Wednesday night. We leave our apartments at 10 PM on a bus to Tel Aviv. We take a sherutim, which is like a big taxi that has special prices to and from big cities, to Jerusalem. In the middle of the drive we tell the driver to drop us off at this highway exit that Eli's friend told him about. We knew that the hike that we wanted to do the next day was around this exit. So we get out of the sherutim at this place:

Next we decide to look for a place to sleep. Seeing as it was about 12:15 AM we were hoping for a secluded forest or something to set up camp. We wandered up a hill and through this path until we found out that we were in Castel, a state park that is the site of a battle in 1948 when Israel fought for its independence. We walked towards the top of Castel, which was a military fortress, and found a nice, remote spot to set up camp. We unrolled our sleeping bags and slept for a bit. Our camping spot looked like this:

We woke the next morning and began our trek towards the hike. We got some directions from a park ranger and a random lady and started walking along a high way. After walking for some time, I saw a turnoff from the highway and we checked it out to see if we could find the hike. We were looking for Sataf, a marked hike, so we needed to find trail markers. We couldn't find anything and were a bit discouraged because we had been walking for about an hour. We were going to turn back because Eli's friend told him we maybe took a wrong turn some 4 km back, but we decided to walk for another two minutes before turning back. We walked for 15 seconds around a bend and saw a huge sign for Sataf.
We walked to the top of a mountain were the beginning of the hike began and stopped for a quick tea and cake at a restaurant that is up there. The waiter there gave us a handy map and we began our trek down the mountain towards some cool springs and tunnels. The hike was a really beautiful showcase of the Judaean Mountains. Jerusalem is actually a huge city that is built in top of several large hills/mountains. Their size is somewhere between hills and mountains, but the Israelis call them mountains. So this hike was down one of the mountains and was really amazing. The mountains all have ancient terraces from thousands of years ago. Terracing is a farming technique that levels out hills so that you can grow plants on them. Here are a few terraces and other things that we found there:






The springs that we found were really developed in ancient times. They are now tunnels that you can walk or crawl through and it's really cool. This is what the springs looked like:
In the middle of the hike we met a group of school children who were more than ecstatic when they heard that we were from America. At the end of the hike we found ourselves pretty far from town and we needed a way to get back. We asked the teachers of the school for a hitch into Jerusalem and after some conferring they decided to lend us a hand and they drove us for about 20 minutes to a bus stop. From there we went into town and ended the adventure with some shwarma.

News

So living in this apartment is a lot of fun. I'm getting very close with my roommates and I've been doing some really fun things in Tel Aviv. Last week my friends and I found a flier advertising what we thought was a bassist from France leading a band of local musicians in some venue in Tel Aviv. We decided to go to the show and check it out. We show up and the place is a bit empty and there is some DJ there. We just assumed that the DJ was performing as an opening act before the main guy. We hung out and danced for a while before we realized that the DJ was the advertised act and that we were mistaken. We wanted to hangout for a bit and get our money's worth so we stayed for a while. We saw that the majority of people coming into the club were guys and that was juts adding to the already overwhelming male majority. There were butterflies hanging from the ceiling and some floral decorations too. We quickly deduced that we were in a gay club. We didn't want to leave just because it was a gay club because that would make us look like bigots so we stayed for another 10 minutes and then left.
I learned the other day that one of the guys who I volunteer with was taken directly out of prison a few months back to take part in the gardening project that I do. He's a nice guy.

New Apartment

So I moved two weeks ago after my Poland trip into an apartment into a city south of Tel Aviv called Bat Yam. Everyone else in my program also moved into apartments here or in the neighboring city Holon. I'm living with five other guys; two from England, two from Jersey, and one Israeli who is doing a separate program called Tsofim. We get a food stipend so we go shopping together. It's be a bit tough eating healthily, but I've done quite well.
I work as a gardener with kids who, for many different reasons, had to drop out of high school. They get employed by the city to do groundskeeping for different schools and parks. I work outside and quite hard mostly so I'm happy to do the work.
The city Bat Yam is mostly lower middle class families. My apartment is about 15 minutes away from the beach so once it gets warmer out and the days get longer I'll be able to go swimming regularly.
Everything is going very well in Bat Yam and I'm having a lot of fun.

Poland

So I spent a week in Poland last week touring the country and seeing the rich Jewish life that existed before the Shoah and the destruction that was the Shoah. So we started out taking a 6 AM flight which meant we were in the airport by 2 AM. So we didn't sleep much and when we landed went to the best preserved Jewish cemetery in the country. Located in Warsaw, this huge cemetery was used to outline the different types of Jews living in Poland and how Judaism today is more of a direct descendant of Eastern European Jews than some of us realize. We learned about the three major types of Jews in Poland: religious, Zionist, and Bund Jews. The religious Jews are self explanatory; the Zionist Jews are mostly socialists who wanted to come to Israel and start a Jewish state; and the Bund was a Polish political party of socialist Jews who were nationalist. So we learned about the three types of Jews by their graves. The varieties can be seen here:
This is the grave of a Rosh Yeshiva whose grandson is the Joseph Salevechik, the founder of modern Orthodoxy.

This is a grave of a member of the Bund party.

And this is the first Jew to write prose in Yiddish. Before the only writing done in Jewish life was on Torah.

Later in the week we visited a shul in Tykochin, a small village that was once half Jewish before the Shoah. The shul was beautifully restored and there also exists a destroyed Jewish cemetery. The shul looks like this and here is a tomb stone in the cemetery.


We also visited three death camps, but I don't want to put pictures of them up. I visited Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdonek, and Treblinka. I'm not going to talk about much because everyone reading this blog should see those place and pass their own judgments.

So I spent much of the week seeing old Jewish life, learning, and seeing the destruction of the Nazis.
Two of the last things we did were listen to the testimony of a 'righteous gentile' and go to a newly discovered shul in some really small town. A righteous gentile is someone who helped save a life of a Jewish person during the Shoah. We listened to a woman's account of how her family housed a woman.

The next morning we went to this small shul in the basement of some Polish family. The local government is awaiting money to restore it, but this is what we saw.


We came back to Israel after taking a 10:30 flight out of Poland. We landed at around 4 and went straight to the Western Wall. We showed up right before sunrise to do shacarit, the morning services. It was amazing to be back in Israel and the sky was beautiful. There was no better way to appreciate Israel than the Western Wall.

Hot Springs

I went to a place called Gan HaShlosha. It is known for it's beautiful hot springs. It looks like this:

The small park area is a few pools surrounded by nice, green meadows. The pools are fed by a natural spring. The water coming out is a really nice temperature. I couldn't tell you the exact temperature because I'm bad at estimating, but I will equate it to a few degrees colder than a bath. The water was lukewarm, but not so hot. It was refreshing to swim in the water. On the side of the pool we found a small cave and ventured into it. The cave looks like this:

The cave is on the face of a cliff and on the top of the cliff are some trees. The roots of the tree go down the twenty-some feet of the cliff and are in the cave. The roots look like this:

I went with four of my friends and here is a picture of them:


On Sunday I go to Poland for a week. I'll update after that. I'm done on the kibbutz and I'll be moving to Bat Yam for three months in two weeks.

Tiyul

A tiyul is the Hebrew word for hike or trip. Today I took off work today with a friend of mine and we went on a hike. We started out walking through the fields of the kibbutz and then through some really pretty meadows and hills. After we ventured onto onto the fields of a neighboring kibbutz. The aforementioned meadows looked like this:

After that we hit the highway and walked for a bit along until turning onto another highway. At this point it was raining quite heavily, but that would never dampen our spirits. We continued going on the highway for a solid two hours before we found the stream we were looking for. Named Nachal Kibbutzim, the stream is a cute little stream with some trees and picnic spots around it. On one tree we found a little swing that looks like this:

After we hung out around the stream we followed it across the highway and then stayed right next to the stream until it ran into the ancient ruins of Beit Sha'an. Unfortunately the gate to the ruins were closed so we were forced to jump the fence. The ruins are from roughly 5000 BCE and were controlled by Romans, Israelites, Egyptians, Crusaders, and more. They were amazingly intact and there was also the biggest amphitheater in the middle east.





We walked through the ruins and then out the entrance without anyone noticing the illegality of our visit. We walked to a shwarma restaurant, had lunch, and went home. All in all we were walking for about 6 hours starting at 10 in the morning. It was a really fun tiyul and I'm thinking I'll take another impromptu tiyul next week.
I have one more week of kibbutz life before I go on a Poland trip for 9 days. Then I'll be moving into an apartment in Bat Yam, a city south of Tel Aviv, where I'll be doing community service and taking Hebrew classes, Ulpan.
Right now I am really enjoying being on this kibbutz. It's a lot of fun and it's a very relaxed atmosphere if you don't mind doing hard work with people who don't speak English.

A Survey of Murals on the Kibbutz

So the kibbutz has a school either attached to it or on the outskirts of it. Today I rode my friend's bike through the school, called a beit sepher, and took some pictures of the murals that decorate the school. Here are some of my favorites.



This picture above is a view from the Kibbutz at sunrise.

In other news I spend this past Shabbas on the kibbutz. Basically it was the most relaxed atmosphere I've ever been in. It was a very enjoyable Shabbas and I would recommend spending a Shabbs on a religious kibbutz to anyone. The 700 people who live on the kibbutz are all Shomer Shabbas. There is no one in work clothes, no one is driving, and it's a powerful Shabbas energy to anyone who pays attention to it.
This Shabbas I'm being set up in Jerusalem at a Chasidic man's house.

Kibbutz

So I'm living now on Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu. The kibbutz is about 5 km away from Beit She'an, a city with Roman runis. My day basically goes like this:
I wake up at 5:00. It's awful and I hate it, but I haven't a choice. I go to work which has so far only been in the kitchen. While in the kitchen I do a lot of work that will never ever help me in any professional field outside of janitorial work. I do a lot of cleaning and moving of vegetables. I sometimes cut vegetables. They like to give me cucumbers or eggplant, but never tomatoes because they're too tricky. I spend a few hours in the kitchen cutting or moving food around and then I go to breakfast. I eat a sizely breakfast here because I'm away for about three hours before I get to eat. After breakfast is more work till around 1 when I get to go to lunch and have the rest of the day to myself. The women who I work with aren't from the kibbutz. Working in the kitchen
isn't highly regarded because it isn't a money making venture so they have to bring in outside help to run the kitchens. So I've met a lot of non-kibbutz people.
With my free time I work out, learn with a guy named Sarel, read, listen to music, and hangout with the other kids on my program. I've developed a whole workout regiment that utilizes my body weight mostly.
I learning about ten new words of Hebrew a day and it's very exciting and challenging for me.
Here as some pictures of the kibbutz.

This the horizon at about 6:20 AM. That mountain in the distance is Jordan.

This is a really cool tree.

This is a playground and not a junkyard.

This is a a cat in a man made pond at the entrance of the Kibbutz.
Marc is in Israel and I will be spending Shabbas with him.

Kibbutz and Chofest Part II

I decided to switch from my army program into the Kibbutz program. Although I tried to make due with my army program, I decided in the end that I wasn't going to get out of the program what I wanted to get out of my year in Israel. The program wasn't religious-orientated in the least bit, and I came to Israel for mostly religious reasons. So now I'm spending my first day at Kibbutz Sede Elliyahu. From what I've seen of this place it is absolutely beautiful. Next year will be their 70th year in existence. I'll take some pictures soon and put them up.
The Kibbutz is religious so the men are expected to wear kippot and the entire Kibbutz is Shomer Shabbas (observes Shabbas) every week. I'm very excited to be in a community like this where it's both very small and accepting, but also religious.

For New Years I went to a bar in Tel Aviv and partook in a decent amount of shenanigans. I slept at a friend's place in Ramat Gan which is a small city just outside of Tel Aviv. I then went back to Jerusalem to lay low for a few days. I watched a bunch of movies, read a bit, and worked out. For Shabbas I went to a moshav called Mevo Modiim with the very religious part of the program called Shalem. I had a very good time with in the moshav and had a very interesting Shabbas afternoon. I went for a walk with some friends and one girl started petting a dog through its gate. The owner of the dog came out and told us that her goat had just given birth about 45 minutes ago and that we could see it if we wanted. The moshav is very a small , close-nit community of only 40 families and the woman seemed nice so we proceeded into her yard. Her yard is basically a small zoo with bird cages of parrots and peacocks and many small farm animals like lambs and goats. She showed us this tiny, adorable goat that was failing at feeding from her mother. She was worried about the baby goat's feeding so we went on an adventure to find hay. First the woman, Judy, sent us by ourselves to her neighbor's to ask for some spare hay. We go to the neighbor's place and she basically chews us out about how she's a volunteer and how Judy should get her own hay and blah blah blah. We went back to Judy's and she told us we went to the wrong neighbor so we went to like four other people's houses looking for this one guy who owns a horse. We finally found him and he showed us his beautiful horse and gave us hay and we went back and chilled with the baby goat for a bit before going back to do Shabbas things.

So I'll be on this Kibbutz for the next two months and I'll update with the jobs I do and other things like that.