Jerusalem and Bethlehem

New Year’s Day

1 January 2013

Jerusalem and Bethlehem

We all seem to be suffering from the same sleep issue:  Everybody is waking up around 4:30 AM, regardless of our home timezone.  I'm glad I decided to bypass the NYE party just a few hours earlier; In spite of the lack of sleep, I feel pretty good, and am ready to see the sites of the day.

I'll mention in passing that this cell phone and SIM card have been awesome, I can’t describe how connected I feel, as if I am more of a “local” this way rather than resorting to hotel Wi-Fi or Internet kiosks.  Minor issue, but when you are in a foreign land even something this subtle can be warming.

Our first stop was in Bethlehem, which is in the West Bank and is actually held by the PLO.  (Just to set the stage, Jerusalem and Bethlehem are only a few minutes apart by car.)  We arrived at the Church of the Nativity very early in order to be at the head of the line.  The church is actually four churches with different areas in the same building:  Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Roman Catholic.  As we waited, it was a bit depressing as they were taking down the Christmas decorations, but nonetheless we were in a very holy site on New Year's Day, so I really should not lament; after all, we saw the cave in which Jesus was born as well as the Star of Jesus and the manger.  

Along the line of my security comment in the previous blog:  Security getting in to Bethlehem was easy, nothing more than a simple drive through, with nothing worth noting.  On the way out (i.e., from Bethlehem back into Jerusalem), the Israelis were much more stringent; they did not make us get off the bus, but they did board it, along with their automatic weapons, to give us a solid inspection.  I'll also point out we were warned not to take pictures of the crossing, or the situation would have been much more uncomfortable.

Our next stop was the Israeli Museum where we saw a large (50:1) scale model of the Old Temple, but more importantly the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Book of the Shrine building.

After that, it was on to the Holocaust Museum, with the first walk through the Children’s Memorial (sponsored by the Spiegel family) commemorating the 1.5 million Jewish children who were lost; it was incredibly striking in its design, with a mere five candles reflected into multiple mirrors given the impression of a million.  Subsequently, we went through the main memorial which was a zig-zag wandering through several very poignant reminders of the atrocities served up during the first half of the 20th century.

This last stop brought up an age old question for me:  What did the German civil population know about the Holocaust?  When I asked our Jewish tour guide, he was adamant the average German did indeed know what was going on, while the historian among us was more gray, suggesting the average German citizen was struggling to survive in light of the Versailles treaty, and they really did not have time to research or question or investigate.  (He even suggested that generals such as Rommel did not know about the atrocities until 1943.)  The historian also explained that you really cannot understand WWII unless you look at it in conjunction with WWI and the Treaty of Versailles.  I'd certainly hope that the historian is correct, and that the average German was unaware of what was indeed happening in his own government; in the US, we have certainly been blind-sided before.