The Past Three Sundays

It's taken me a long time to catch up on this blogging, and I haven't been updating about our Sunday excursions either. So this post is going to include the last three Sundays.
The first Sunday back after Greece and Bulgaria (November 22nd) had a focus on the Christian Communities in Jerusalem. We went to the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, then we went into the Church.

Views From Outside and on top of the Church of the Holy Seplucher

We also went to visit the Armenian quarter in the Old City. We went into the church there, and watched a service. The Armenian church is more of a monastery, there are male students who study to become priests and they live in this secluded building. Even the church is only open for less than an hour each day, during the time of their afternoon prayer. The church was beautiful though (pictures weren't allowed so I'll have to describe it). It had these big huge domed ceilings and these hanging lanterns or something along those lines everywhere. Each lantern was hung on this pulley system and the heights could be adjusted at any point. There were these huge columns with portraits of saints all over. And this little nooks along the sides with candles. After seeing the church we met with the high priest of the Armenian community. He was pretty interesting albeit fairly right wing and stuck in his ways. He was actually American, and he had come to the monastery as a man in his twenties and ended up devoting his life to the church. In the Armenian church there are two different types of priests. One who devotes his entire life to the church, lives in a portion of the monastery and practices celibacy. The other is one who has a family, and a home, but is still a priest in the community. I am unclear as to the different roles of the two priests. The man we met was of the former type, and one of the most remarkable characteristics was this huge amethyst, diamond and gold ring that is given to the priests by the High Church upon reaching a certain level of priesthood.
The next Sunday we spent with artist Tobi Kahn. Tobi Kahn is a painter/sculptor who comes every year to Kivunim to help organize and curate an art show. Towards the end of the year (in May) in Jerusalem there will be a Kivunim art show with pictures taken by the students. Tobi oversees the production, selection and set up of the show. Any student who want to help him is able to. We woke up at 4:30 that morning and walked into the old city to watch the sun rise. It was a pretty remarkable sight. We spent several hours watching the light change in and around the old city. From there we went to the Supreme Court building, the architecture there is incredible, then to the Israel Museum and the sculpture garden and then finally to a neighborhood right around the Jewish Shuk in Jerusalem. It was pretty cool because a lot of us had never been to these places. We didn't have to listen to guides talk at us, we got to go around and see things for ourselves and take pictures.

First Light around the Old City

The Sculpture Garden at the Israel Museum

In the Neighborhood Around the Jewish Shuk

This past Sunday we spent the day focusing on the issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict. More specifically the West Bank, The Green Line and the security fence. We went to Givat Haviva, which is an institute committed to the education on this conflict and trying to come to a solution for shared citizenship (apparently the term co-existence is now politically incorrect. You may not know, but that idea and more specifically that phrase is a huge part of Kivunim's philosophy and mission statement, so there were chuckles when the woman talking to us told us that the new term is shared citizenship). After being at this center we went to several places that exemplified this issue. We went to the West Bank, we saw a town that was literally divided in half by the Green Line and we saw, from a distance the security fence. It was interesting, although to be honest, I got somewhat geographically confused when we stopped time after time after time.

The Following Two are from the top of a roof overlooking the town divided by the Green Line

Inside this van are a bunch of Palestinian men who take this transport back and forth across the Green Line every single day.

This is a brief recap of the last couple weeks.

Bulgaria

Sorry, it has taken so long to finish these posts from the International Trip.
From Thessaloniki we went to Bulgaria, but to get there we took a 6 hour long train. The train was very cool, it was like something out of Harry Potter, with sliding compartments along a hallway and ours had 6 people in each compartment.
So we left Thessaloniki at about 6 and arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria at about midnight. We then went immediately to the hotel. (Background) Bulgaria was under the communist regime until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991 so the country is still in a transitional state between communism and a new autonomous government. So, keeping that in mind we arrived at our hotel, which probably could have been gorgeous with a good decorator. The rooms though; were gray and somewhat foreboding. Our room in particular had torn wallpaper on the walls, and this carpet, which you could tell had been there for way too many years. The hotel was like a donut, and in the center was this big open space, and there were glass windows all the way up, so that was pretty cool.
Okay, so the first day in Bulgaria we went on a walking tour of the city, it was pretty cool, although I couldn't hear what the guide was saying.

Pictures from the Walking Tour of Sofia

This man was selling all of this Bulgarian themed touristy stuff. No one bought anything, but a lot of people took their picture with him

We then had a picnic in this park/square. We (as a group) had all this food laid out for ourselves, but these older people kept coming up to us and trying to take it. They thought it was a charity or a soup kitchen type thing, and we kept having to wave them away. They didn't understand English and we didn't understand Bulgarian so it was hard to get our point across. Later that evening we went to the Jewish Community Center of Sofia and had dinner with the teenagers there. The Jewish community of Bulgaria is almost entirely under the age of 30. Since the fall of the communist regime and the ability to practice Judaism again, many parents have told their kids about their identity and the kids have begun to rebuild the community. After dinner, the Bulgarian youth took us all out. I went to a Karaoke Bar which was a lot of fun.
The next day we saw met with a bunch of different people from the Jewish community, including a Sephardic woman, a Rabbi, a woman in the Jewish community whose husband was not Jewish but who was raising her son Jewish and then some more of the youth we had met last night. After that we went to see the synagogue of Sofia. It was absolutely incredible, huge and beautiful with these big domed ceilings. The synagogue had been bombed during WWII and they had just finished restoring it this past September.

Pictures of the Sofia Synagogue

After seeing this synagogue we participated along with Bulgarians our age in cleaning graffiti off the streets. More specifically we cleaned swastikas. There were a huge number of them. It surprised me, a little, to see how commonplace they were. There were some smaller ones that my group wanted to remove, but the Bulgarians we were with said "don't worry about those, there are a lot of those small ones, let's go find the bigger ones".
The next morning we packed up and left Sofia, and headed to Plovdiv, another city in Bulgaria. We saw another synagogue, but then we went to the very unique thing about this city. In Plovdiv there is a monument to the Holocaust (as is found in many European cities) but this monument was in honor of all the Jews who had survived, instead of commemorating those lives which had been lost.
Background: No Bulgarian Jews died during the holocaust. The Bulgarian Government refused to deport the Jews living within Bulgaria proper to concentration camps. Many of them were sent to forced labor camps, but returned after the war. Unfortunately, from the territories that Bulgaria controlled at the time (Macedonia, Yugoslavia) many Jews were deported and killed.

Pictures from the Plovdiv Synagogue

After the memorial we went to the community center of Plovdiv where we met with the elderly community there, almost all of whom had survived the holocaust. They spoke Hebrew and Ladino (Juedo-Spanish) and a couple of them spoke English. Those who spoke Ladino understood Spanish, so that helped in order to be able to communicate with them. At this center was one of the most incredible feelings I had felt all trip. Back in Thessaloniki we had learned a Ladino song called Adio Querida. We sang it at this community center in Plovdiv and instead of the other people just listening, they all started to sing along, and there we were, 47 teenagers and 20 or so elderly people all singing the same song. It was a shivers sent up my spine kind of feeling.
After the community center we had lunch, and then headed to the airport to come back home to Israel!

They're coming!

More blog posts are on their way, I promise.