Hello again from Bus 827! This is New College student, Michael Waas writing. As of right now, we are in the beautiful Galilee region in North Israel, directly across from the town of Tiberias. As beautiful and scenic it is, we must remember and honor our forefathers and friends who paid the greatest price for this incredible nation.
A few, short days ago, we visited Mount Herzl, outside of Jerusalem. Our new Israeli friends were in their uniforms as we arrived. We walked up to the peak to the grave site of the founder of Modern, secular Zionism, Theodore Herzl. There, we paid tribute to the man who sparked the dream of a future state where Jews could once again live in our ancestral homeland, away from the pogroms of Russia and the discrimination of Europe. If it weren't for Herzl, it is quite likely that the Jewish State of Israel would not be in existence.
As great and important a man Dr. Herzl was, it simply pales in comparison to what is on the lower levels of the mountain. Many of the Israeli prime ministers, presidents, Speakers of the Knesset, and ministers in the government are buried on the level below Herzl. Slowly, as we milled through the graves, we came upon one that is so brutally different than all the rest: Yitzhak Rabin and his wife. Rabin, a cold military commander later turned pragmatic peace dove, was struck down by a radical fundamentalist Jew on November 4, 1995. To me, this grave struck a personal chord with me. I remembered watching every minute of his funeral as I grieved with the rest of the world at the loss of quite possibly, the best hope the world has ever seen for peace in the Middle East. With the rest of the group, we remembered the man, not known for his words. Even those of us who did not know his story were touched by the sadness pervading the cold, brutalistic grave.
Below Rabin, there are several memorials on Mount Herzl before entering the military cemetery. One of them is one that grows continually to this day, unfortunately, because terror has not ended for Israel. It was a list of names and years of all the victims of terror attacks against early Jewish settlers in the 1800s till the Hamas bombardment of Ashkelon and Sderot. Our guide Bruce mentioned that he knew one of the victims on the wall. Truly, it was a sobering experience reminding us that while the dream of peace is still alive, there are those out there who only want destruction and conflict in order to fulfill their ideological and religious goals.
Soon after, the mood lifted somewhat when we visited the graves of some of the Jewish parachuters for the British in World War 2 from the British Palestine. A name, familiar to some and unknown to others, was Chana Senesh, who bravely suffered through the antisemitic Hungarian interrogation without releasing the names of her comrades on their mission to help the partisans resist the Nazi's and their collaborators and spy. For her courage, she was executed by firing squad and buried in Hungary and reburied in the country she loved, Israel.
We visited several more graves along the way of Israeli heroes, including the grave of Yoni Netanyahu, who died in the Entebbi operation.
At the end of the cemetery, though, we saw the graves of the brave soldiers who laid down their lives in the past few years. Many of our Israeli friends knew people who were buried in this part of the cemetery. As we remembered them, the stark reality emerged that even as we are sheltered and safe from the Gaza war, we were witnessing the funeral of a soldier killed in the operation before our eyes. It was incredible saddening that another young life was lost in the pursuit of stopping terror.
As we left the cemetery, all of us were quite somber. It was then that it became so real to us how Israelis live with this their entire lives, knowing that military service will occur before college and many of them do not return.
A few days later, we arrived at the foot of Mount Herzl, to the Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem. Our first activity at Yad Vashem was listening to the testimony of a survivor. His name was Efroim Mol, a Russian Jew born in Belgium. He survived the war by hiding in a nunnery in France and then being adopted by sympathetic French Catholics. This would serve to be a good introduction to the memorial of Yad Vashem.
Yad Vashem is so striking for its architecture. You can't miss it. As we entered the main museum, the walls were dull gray concrete, creating a claustrophobic, dark setting. What was extremely fascinating, though, was the walls were pointed as though a triangle and it gradually opened up until it opened up into a plaza overlooking the hills of Jerusalem. Along the path, the main floor was broken up, preventing us from continuing in a straight line. The first room dealt with the rise of Nazism all the way until the end which was the haunting Memorial room containing all of the Pages of Testimony gathered so far for the victims of the Holocaust. 3.5 million names on those pages and yet, we may never know the rest nor the extent of the victims of Hitler's maniacal plot. The Memorial room is another feat of architecture, the only place containing any natural rock, the room has a deep well in the center of water, surrounded by Jerusalem stone, creating a reflecting pool for the pictures above and also a symbol of life. Water brings life; even as Hitler tried to erase any memory of these people, their memory, their yartzheit still burns on. I, myself, have several family members from the Netherlands and Greece remembered in the POTs.
Our final stop at Yad Vashem was the hall of the children. An absolutely haunting hall where a narrator reads the names of all the known Jewish child victims of the Holocaust. The chamber is pitch black, only illuminated by several small Yartzheit candles the reflect off of mirrored walls. There are no scenes of joy in this children's memorial; only the memories and flickering lights of their undying souls.
That's it for now from Bus 827. As they say in Israel, az yalla bye!
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