Today was a somber day in Jerusalem -- weatherwise and otherwise. Our guide was Mohammed, a Palestinian Arab whose family has lived on Mt. Scopus east of the Old City for generations. He has 8000 cousins of varying degrees of proximity, as many of his ancestors had 10 children. He, however, has one child, a daughter, and does not intend to have any more, because he wants to pay for her eductaiton so she can go to university.
Mohammed said that if the Israelis are lucky to have the the Palestinian problem, because without it, there would be civil war between the OrthodoxJews and the others.
We started with a visit to Yad Vashem -- the Holocaust Museum.The human figures in this model of Crematorium II at Birkenau are about 3 inches tall.
Next we visited the Israel Museum, where we saw this teak altar screen from a 16th century synagogue in Kochi, Kerala.
And on the way to Tel Aviv, we stopped in Ein Karem for a visit to the Church of St John the Babptis. Unfortunately the Church was completely filled with scaffolding, but the walls of the courtyard outside the church were covered with 6-foot tall inscriptions of Luke 1, verses 67-69, in about 20 different languages.
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| Ethiopian |
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| Sri Lankan |
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| French |
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| Japanese |
And today, we ate well!
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| Machneyuda - Jerusalem |
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| La Shuk |
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