Tuesday, October 18, 2022, by Phil and Lori Prins
Tuesday was a very eventful day. We started the day by visiting Yad Vashem. It is Israel’s official memorial to the six million Jews that died in the Nazi’s design to implement their “final solution” to exterminate the Jewish people. Going through the main building which houses the Holocaust History Museum is an emotional and haunting experience. The galleries not only explain the history of antisemitism from the Jewish perspective but also tell the story of the Nazi’s efforts to dehumanize and kill off people of that religion. The story is told chronologically and is made more effective and disturbing by focusing on telling the stories of specific families and individuals through videos, photographs, and displays of the personal effects of victims. In the Hall of Names, you are surrounded by the photographs and names of the known victims. In a separate building, the Children’s Memorial is dedicated to the 1.5 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust. The whole experience gives the visitor a perspective on the Jewish narrative and an understanding of their thoughts from a historical view. You cannot leave this memorial unaffected.
From there, we headed down to the Dead Sea for a break. On the way, we stopped at a ‘sea level’ marker where several members of our group experienced their first camel ride. Then we stopped at Qumran to learn more about the Essene (“Sons of Light”) community that wrote the Dead Sea scrolls. Walking through the archaeological dig of their community buildings and also looking up at the caves in which the scrolls were found in 1947, gave an insight into what their life was like for 100 years until the community was destroyed by the Romans in 68 CE. Even though it was hot (low 90s), the experience of floating in the buoyant waters of the Dead Sea was a very welcome respite.
We arrived back at the hotel just in time for an excellent and educational talk by Ben Kfir and George Sa’adeh of the Parent’s Circle. The Parent’s Circle is comprised of 120 Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost their children due to the conflict. Ben, an Israeli, lost his daughter on September 9, 2003, when a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber detonated himself at a bus station and George, a Palestinian, lost his 12 year old daughter on March 25, 2003, when members of a special Israeli Defense task force shot at a car in which he was driving his family. Both of the men thought about, but then rejected, the idea of revenge and instead decided that the better path was to work for peace and reconciliation together with other parents whose children had been killed by “the other side”. Ben made the excellent point that peace normally comes from the top leaders down while the process of reconciliation goes from the bottom up. Each man made statements that stuck with us, George said “The wall in the head is the problem, not the cement wall” (referring to the wall constructed between Israel and Palestine) while Ben urged us to be “pro-peace, not pro-Israel or pro-Palestine”.
Well, all that was quite a bit to handle but fortunately we ended the day with a special Palestinian dinner including a birthday cake dessert in honor of Charlie Lewis’s birthday.