Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 6

 

[As I observed at the end of Part 5 of “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982” (23 July), this is the final installment of the Israeli portion of the account of my travels in Israel and Egypt.  It chronicles my last days in the country, including a visit to Bethlehem five days before Christmas, a day in the Negev Desert in the south of Israel, and then my departure from Jerusalem and arrival in Cairo, Egypt. 

[As I always do, I recommend going back to 11 July and reading Parts 1 through 5 of you haven’t been following along.  Explanations and comments on some of what will come up below are in the earlier parts of the post and what transpires below will make more sense if you’ve read that first.  (Parts 2, 3, and 4 were posted on 14. 17. and 20 July, respectively.)]

Jerusalem & Bethlehem – Monday, 20 December

Today we got a look around the Old City of Jerusalem.  Until 1967, of course, visitors to Israel wouldn’t have been permitted to enter the Old City because it was under Jordanian control, but that changed after the Six-Day War and Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem.

Israel has never formally annexed East Jerusalem, but in defiance of a United Nations resolution condemning the occupation, the Knesset passed the Jerusalem Law of 1980 which declared that a “complete and united” Jerusalem was “the capital of Israel.” 

Upon the occupation, Israel granted permanent residency to all East Jerusalem Arabs present there at the time.  Palestinian Jerusalemites were offered the opportunity to apply for Israeli citizenship, but most opted to remain permanent residents. 

East Jerusalem has been integrated into Jerusalem and the Arab population has become an integral part of the State of Israel.  Members of all religions in greater Jerusalem have access to their holy sites under Israeli administration; Muslims maintain control of the Temple Mount and other Islamic holy sites in the Old City.

The visit to the Old City included following the Via Dolorosa (Latin for ‘Sorrowful Way,’ often translated ‘Way of Suffering’), the traditional route Jesus is believed to have walked from the Antonia Fortress, the presumed site of Jesus’ trial for treason (there is archeological reason to believe that the trial occurred elsewhere, but this is the traditional site since the 18th century) to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, believed to be the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and his empty tomb, possibly the two holiest sites in all Christendom.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was consecrated in 335 CE, which is when the church established that this was the place called Calvary or Golgotha where Jesus was crucified and then buried, and where his burial place was found open and empty by Paul the Apostle three days after Jesus’ death on the cross.  This miracle is the foundational event of Christianity.

The Via Dolorosa is marked by nine of the 14 Stations of the Cross; the remaining five stations are inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  The route and the churches and chapels that commemorate the several New Testament events pertaining to Jesus’ life and ministry in Jerusalem are mostly in the Christian Quarter of the Old City.

The walled Old City, which was the whole of Jerusalem until as late as the 19th century—today’s neighborhoods and sections of the New City were separate towns and villages until absorbed into modern Jerusalem.  (The city walls date to the mid-16th century, built by the Ottomans.  The Ottoman Empire ruled Jerusalem from about 1516 to 1917.  After World War I [1914-18], the League of Nations awarded Great Britain a mandate to administer Palestine; the British Mandate was in force from 1923 until Israel declared independence in 1948.)

Simon took particular delight in taking us to certain of the wall’s entry gates—mostly because of their names.  One was the Golden Gate which, according to Jewish tradition, is the gate through which the Messiah will enter Jerusalem.  To prevent the Messiah's entry, the Arabs sealed the gate several centuries ago.

The other spot, a much older gate (whose actual location is still in debate) that’s mentioned in the Old Testament Book of Nehemiah (Chapter 8), is the Water Gate.  Remember, this was 1982, only 10 years after the Watergate Scandal (so called because it took place in the Watergate Complex near the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.) was revealed and eight years after Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace from the U.S. presidency because of his part in the skullduggery.

Jerusalem’s Water Gate is the place from which the priest Ezra (see also Part 5), who is celebrated for bringing the Torah back to Jerusalem after the Babylonian Exile, read the law to the Jerusalemites (from verse 3):

And he read therein before the broad place that was before the water gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women, and of those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the Law.

Jerusalem’s Water Gate was so named because, according to most theories, it was located near Jerusalem’s only source of fresh water. 

(Washington’s Watergate is also named because it’s near water—the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, one of whose locks or “gates” is near the site of the complex and the “gate” that regulates the flow of water from the Potomac River into the Tidal Basin.  There was also the Water Gate Inn, a restaurant that operated on the site before the complex was built.)

The Old City is divided into four quarters: the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Armenian Quarter and the Jewish Quarter.  These are historical and traditional names and no longer have any relationship to the populations of the various sections of the city.

The Western Wall (so called because it’s the remains of the western segment of the retaining wall for the Temple Mount) or Wailing Wall is located in the Jewish Quarter.  (The Temple Mount is the site of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, important holy sites for Muslims.)

After walking through parts of the Old City, we ended up at the Western Wall, which has been designated a synagogue and commands extreme reverence from all visitors, Jew, Muslim, or Christian.  Yarmulkes (that’s a Yiddish word; the Hebrew, more common in Israel, is kippot [plural; singular is kippah]) are worn by Jewish men—there’s always a supply for non-observant Jews like me—or some respectful head-covering for non-Jewish men, and conversation is kept to a minimum and conducted in soft tones.

Historical lectures and tour-guide spiels are delivered back from the Wall itself in the plaza, which also serves as the spectator section for religious ceremonies conducted at the Wall.

Which brings us to the special event of the tour: the bar mitzvah of the young man—since the ritual marks his passage from childhood into adulthood—traveling with us.  These ceremonies are arranged by agencies around the world and there are bar mitzvot going on all the time at the Wall, several at once.  The ceremony is held right in front of the Wall along a narrow stretch of pavement that runs the length of the Wall fragment which serves as the bimah or “stage’ for the rabbi and other participants—in this case, of course, the bar mitzvah boy. 

Tables are set up along the path to serve as reading desks on which the Torah rests during the service.  (There are vaults at the left end of the path where the materials for the ceremonies are kept, including the Torah scrolls, since there aren’t arks on the Wall as there would be on the walls of a synagogue building.

Because the Western Wall is an Orthodox synagogue, bar mitzvot are only for young men.  Girls have their bat mitzvah ceremonies several yards away within sight of the Wall.  Our young man’s sister observed her coming-of-age that way here.

There are always scores of observers at these multiple ceremonies—some, of course, are relatives and friends of the celebrants, but others are just people who like to watch events at the Wall.  Some are visitors like us, and others are Jerusalemites who come out regularly.

On the day we gathered for our traveling companion’s event, there were large groups of Yemeni Jewish women—apparently not an uncommon presence—and they engaged in a customary celebration of the ceremony when it was over: they ululate, a kind of high-pitched vocal trilling resembling a wail, and then they throw pieces of hard candy toward the bimah.  The ululation is an expression, in this instance, of joy and the candy is a symbol of the wish for the boys to have sweet lives.

The ceremony, the only one if its kind I’ve ever witnessed, was touching and moving.  I’ve been to many bar mitzvot over the years, though they were all for boys I knew or to whom I was related.  (I’ve only been to a few bat mitzvot, and they were all for cousins.)  I got to know what to expect—except for this one.  Aside from taking place at the Western Wall, which would make it stand out in any case, it was an Orthodox service, which is less streamlined—and less English—than the Reformed tradition in which I grew up.

Oh, and our little gifts were appreciated—in case anyone was worried.  The children didn’t have mezuzot already (see also Part 3).

In the afternoon, we drove to Bethlehem, a West Bank city about six miles south of Jerusalem.  [Bethlehem’s population then was about 16,300; today it’s about 28,600.]  Until the Six-Day War, Bethlehem was under Jordanian control and inaccessible from Israel; now it’s administered by Israel like all the West Bank, so we were able to pay a visit to the traditional birthplace of Jesus.

But first, a little catch-up.  This was 20 December, five days before Christmas, and I’d brought along my holiday cards, all with greetings written and sealed in addressed envelopes so I could get them stamped and postmarked from Christmas Town—Bethlehem.  I was taking a chance that five days would be enough time for the cards to get to their destinations in the States and elsewhere around the world in good time (I still had a few correspondents in Europe back then).

I suppose it’s no shock that Christmas isn’t a big whoop in Israel—except, of course, in Christian areas and at Christian shrines (like, for instance, Bethlehem).  I needed a few additional cards after I got to Israel, and I was a little surprised to discover how few places in Jerusalem sell Christmas Cards.  Not only were there few stores with any cards at all, but no store that even sold cards had a very wide selection.

(It shouldn’t have been surprising that there also weren’t many Hanukkah cards for sale, either.  First, Hanukkah isn’t as big a holiday outside the U.S. as we make of it here.  It’s American Jewry’s way of competing with Christian Christmas, and it wasn’t really until after World War II and the dawning of the Baby Boom that Hanukkah took on that significance.

(Second, sending out greeting cards of any kind is more an American thing than it is a popular habit anywhere else.  When I lived in Germany, there were Christmas cards—fewer kinds than we have here, but Germans did send and receive them.  But no other holiday or observation was marked with greeting cards the way we use them.

(Oddly, when I got to Cairo, an almost entirely Muslim city, there was more acknowledgment of the Christian holiday than there was in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.  When I was in Beijing on Christmas in 1980, I was really surprised to see holiday decorations in the capital of the officially atheist People’s Republic of China.  Of course, in both Egypt and China, it was for tourists.)

In any case, I had my cards all ready to go when we got to Bethlehem.  Simon not only promised to set aside time for the several of us who had this same errand to take care of it—I thought I was being clever, but it turns out that sending Christmas cards postmarked in Bethlehem is a big thing!—but he informed us that the Bethlehem post office has a special window dedicated to handling Christmas mail.  

Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.  Furthermore, the Bethlehem post office is right on Manger Square, in the center of the town.  So, we Christmas-carders got on the line for the special window and before we knew it, we got our cards processed and we were back out on Manger Square, ready to join Simon and the rest of the group for our visit to the Church of the Nativity, probably the main attraction for visitors, especially Christian pilgrims, to Bethlehem.

The Church of the Nativity, which is shared among several Christian faiths, is built over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth.  Below the sanctuary is a grotto, a small cave that’s traditionally venerated as the birthplace of Jesus, known as the Grotto of the Manger or the Grotto of the Nativity. 

The church, built in the 330s CE, was dedicated in 339.  It’s the oldest major church in the Holy Land and the oldest place in Christendom used continuously as a place of worship.

The birthplace is situated beneath the church’s main altar, and when we went down to see it, I asked a member of our group to take a photo of me next to the grotto.  Unhappily, like the picture of me at Galilee, I no longer have this photo.  (I may not ever have had them; I don't remember getting them from the person who took them—I don't travel with a camera any longer—and we may never have exchanged addresses.)

Negev Desert – Tuesday, 21 December

The next day, we drove south from Jerusalem into the West Bank on our way to the Negev Desert.  Our itinerary said we were going to visit Hebron, a city (population [1982]: 50,000 [2016: 215,000]) 18 miles south of Jerusalem and west of the Dead Sea.  Simon said that Unitours decided to bypass the town because it had been restive lately and could present a danger to western tourists.

Hebron had become the center of the Kach movement, an extreme-right party founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932-90) in 1971.  [The religious extremist who perpetrated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron was a member of Kach and the man who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 was associated with Kach.] 

The main attraction which we missed in Hebron was the Cave of the Patriarchs or the Cave of Machpelah, said to be the burial place of Abraham and his wife, Sarah; Isaac and his wife, Rebecca; and Jacob and his first wife, Leah. 

These tombs make the cave the second holiest place in Judaism (after the Temple Mount) and one of the four most important sites in Islam.  As a result, Hebron has been a place of contention between Muslims and Jews for generations, predating the formation of Israel, not to mention the Six-Day War.

In the Negev, we stopped in Beersheva (also known as Beersheba and Be’er Sheva), a city of 110,000 in 1982 [210,000 in 2019] 74 miles southwest of Jerusalem.  Another biblical city—associated in the Old Testament with Abraham and Isaac—on this tour, Beersheva’s a little different from other Israeli cities we’ve seen.  Most have had largely Arab populations or Ashkenazi Jews, immigrants from Eastern or Central Europe. 

A large portion of Beersheva’s inhabitants, however, were  Sephardi Jews and Mizrahi Jews who immigrated from Arab countries after 1948.  Also among the arrivals were Jews from Ethiopia (Beta Israel) and India (Cochin Jews and Bene Israel).  [Later, immigrants from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, Ashkenazi Jews, arrived as well (see Part 2).]

Thirty miles further south into the desert is Sde Boker, a tiny kibbutz that became the retirement home of the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.  A farming collective of fewer than 500 residents, Sde Boker was founded in 1952.  Ben-Gurion served from 1948 to 1954 and then from 1955 to 1963.  When he stepped down, he retired from public life and moved to Sde Boker; his modest house on the kibbutz is now a museum.  (Though he died in Jerusalem—at 73 of a cerebral hemorrhage—Ben-Gurion is buried near Sde Boker.)

A little over six miles further south is Avdat, the site of the ruins of an ancient city from the 3rd century BCE.  Built by the Nabateans, a nomadic Arab tribe of successful traders, Avdat was a camping ground for Nabataean caravans.  The former archeological site is now part of the Avdat National Park (not to be confused with the Ein Avdat National Park, a few miles north, which is mostly a nature preserve), established shortly after Sde Boker was founded in the early 1950s.

The Avdat ruins were the location for the filming of scenes in the 1973 movie adaptation of Jesus Christ Superstar. 

Traveling in Israel, you get used to seeing antiquities associated with Judaism, the Romans, Christianity (including the Crusades), and Islam.  The Nabateans were an odd-man-out, so to speak—although, of course, there were many ancient civilizations that came and went in the Near East.

This was my last day in Israel.  That evening, I packed for departure for the airport in the morning and my flight to Cairo.

Jerusalem – Wednesday, 22 December

Those of us continuing with Unitours on the Egypt leg of the trip left for Ben Gurion Airport, Israel’s main international gateway.  It’s sort of between Tel Aviv (15 miles northwest) and Jerusalem (33 miles southeast). 

It was built during the British Mandate in the town of Lydda, for which it was named.  In 1948, when the State of Israel was declared, the airport was taken over by the new nation and renamed Lod, the Hebrew name for the town.  It was renamed again in honor of David Ben-Gurion in 1973, the year he died.

We flew El Al, Israeli airlines, I think, and the flight was about an hour.  But here’s an oddity: since Jerusalem is an hour ahead of Cairo, we arrived at about the same time (Eastern European Time) that we left (Israel Standard Time)!

[It’s time to say farewell to the State of Israel and the Middle East.  In Part 7, to be published on 5 August, I’ll commence my recollections of my journey through Egypt, starting with Cairo, the capital.  I was in Israel for 12 days (departing on the 13th) and my sojourn in Egypt will last 11 days (with departure on the 12th).

[I hope you’ll all return for my stay in North Africa, including visits to the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx, many ancient temples, and a cruise down the Nile (“See the pyramids along the Nile . . . .”  Actually, the pyramids are about 10 miles west of the river!  —With apologies to Chilton Price, Pee Wee King, Redd Stewart, and, especially, Jo Stafford!)]