Morocco - Sheep, Donkeys and Couscous

Morocco was incredible, unbelievable and altogether amazing. We spent ten days trekking from side to side of the country. We stayed in a Berber (indigenous people) village and danced with women around a fire, we climbed the Atlas mountains (by bus) and saw the snow covered mountains and we spent a night in the Sahara and walked the most incredible sand dunes. Every moment was awesome and a complete 360 from anything I had experienced before.
We started off the trip leaving Israel on a Monday night quite early. A tip for future travelers TurkishAir is always late. Always always always. We ended up arriving in Casablanca several hours after we planned and immediately went to a Jewish Museum. Our guide for the entire trip was this man named Rafi. Rafi is a Moroccan Jew who has spent the better part of his life investigating and learning about the Jewish population in Morocco and making sure that the public (Muslims) are also aware of the heritage and the presence that of the Jews in Morocco. The Jewish museum was the main point of that first day. We went to a Jewish club for dinner that night. No non-Jews are allowed there after an attempted anti-Semitic attack in which several Jewish clubs were bombed. The food there was great and especially after a ten plus hours of flying it was warmly received.
As you will come to see the better part of each day was spent on the bus. We had bus rides that ranged from 2 hours to about 8. So each day is not going to be as packed full of activities as one might expect.
That first day we visited the only Mosque that non-Muslims are allowed into. It is this huge incredible building that required donations from every single citizen in Casablanca (non-Muslims included) in addition to a huge sum from the monarchy itself.

The Mosque

In Casablanca we went to visit to a Jewish Orthodox school. There we visited several classes and were greeted by singing from all the students and then we met a man named Jackie (the director of the school). Jackie is another Moroccan Jew who has stayed in Morocco his whole life. Several years ago he was the victim of (another) anti-Semitic attack when someone came up from behind him and put an axe through his head. The attacker had intended the ax go through the center of Jackie's skull killing him but as luck would have it at the last moment Jackie turned his head to see who had approached and thus the ax when down the right side of his face. He spent six months in a hospital in France having reconstructive surgery done. He immediately settled back into Morocco, there was no doubt in his mind that he was going to stay. The most incredible part is that he doesn't hold a grudge. At the time of the attack he refused to talk to reporters with the argument that a story like this be a hot coal and would just increase the fighting between Arabs and Jews.

Children at the Jewish School

Jackie

After we headed to this old village called Teuradant. It used to have a vibrant Jewish population, but now there are no Jews remaining. We stayed in a hotel called the Palace of Peace, which really was a Palace. It was this incredible sprawling hotel right next to the old city. The point of this trek out to this small village was to be able to visit a small synagogue that Rafi had restored. During his quest to learn about the Jewish heritage he had come to this village in search of a synagogue that he had heard existed. After asking some of the locals he was told to ask for a man named Harim. When Rafi found Harim Harim pulled a key out of his pocket and asked Rafi "where have you been, I have been waiting for 45 years". The key was the key to the synagogue that Harim had been entrusted with by the last Rabbi when he (Harim) was 15 years old. He had held onto the key all these years in the hopes that a Jew would come looking for it. After visiting the synagogue we had lunch at Harim's house; our first traditional meal.

Views From the Hotel (The Palace of Peace)

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.

More from the International Trip: Thessaloniki

This begins on our first morning in Thessaloniki, the night before I had pretty much fallen into bed, so I didn't really know much about the city. I did know that we weren't staying smack in the metropolitan center, sort of on the outskirts of downtown.
Day 6: This was Friday morning (to put things into perspective). Prior to coming to Greece we had learned a lot about the Thessaloniki Jews during the holocaust (Somewhere around 90% of them perished in the concentration camps) so the Jewish community there was a pretty big focus. A little bit more background: Thessaloniki was once called the Jerusalem of the Balkans, and Thessaloniki had the largest number and ratio of Jews in the community as compared with anywhere else. It used to be that when you were walking down the street every other person was Jewish. Now there are less than 3000 Jews remaining.
On Friday morning we walked to the synagogue in the center of town and met the Rabbi. The congregation there was Sephardic and on the walls of the synagogue there were plaques commemorating all of the prior Jewish communities that has existed in Thessaloniki (there were more than thirty no longer existing synagogues). We also toured a second synagogue that is used solely on High Holy Days. There we, as a group, were taught a Ladino (Hebraic Spanish) song by the Rabbi that would become almost the theme song of our trip and group (We actually sang it last night on Shabbat 11/27).

The Rabbi of the Thessaloniki Community

After the synagogue we visited the Jewish museum of Thessaloniki which was pretty interesting (it had a large focus on the effects of the holocaust) and then we were free to find our own lunch. I ended up at a seafood restaurant, and had shellfish! Which I hadn't had since leaving the United States due to the Kashrut of this program. Later that evening we headed back to the synagogue for Shabbat services and then had dinner at the community center there (the food was quite terrible).
Day 7: Shabbat morning. We walked back to shul for morning services. Some of the male members of our group were reading Torah. (This synagogue was an Orthodox Sephardic community with a mechitza). Following services we had lunch at the community center, then had time to do as wished, followed by Havdalah back at the hotel, then dinner back at the community center, then the night was ours to spend as we wished. Honestly one of the things I'm going to remember about Thessaloniki was the number of times we walked back and forth between the hotel and the synagogue.

Day 8: We woke up, packed up our bags and prepared to leave Thessaloniki. On our way out we stopped at a Byzantium architecture museum an a Greek archeological museum. The Greek archeological museum was much more interesting than the former, it had all of this ancient gold jewelry that was incredible to look at. From there we went to the Old City of Thessaloniki and looked over the city and the ocean from an overlook.

Views From the Old City

From there we visited the Holocaust memorial in the main square of downtown. The sad thing about the memorial was that it was next to a parking lot. There was much attention given to it by anyone in the city, and most people don't even know it exists. It was truly a beautiful memorial, it was this metal twisted sculpture with human forms and flames, and it was sculpted as a hannukiah.

Holocaust Memorial

From there we had free time for lunch, and then we made our way to the train station to board the six hour train to Sofia Bulgaria.

Greece [and Bulgaria]: Continued

Day 4: We had spent the night in Delphi, a small town that consisted literally of two streets, most of which were cafes or hotels. We had some time to walk around the previous night, but in all honesty the time we had exceeded the amount of things to do.

Delphi

The place we went to dinner the night before was incredible. It was right across from the hotel, and they served us all of these interesting dishes including fried cheese, stuffed peppers and then this amazingly delicious desert called loukoumades which were these fried donut balls drenched in honey, powdered sugar and cinnamon. Okay, so this morning we packed up again and went to the Delphi museum and the Temple of the Oracle. The museum was pretty cool, with all these remnants and pieces from the original temple but the Temple was ten times better. It was on this sprawling hillside, and had all of these half destroyed columns and partially constructed buildings. Again the pictures can do a better job explaining then I can, and they still don't capture entirely.

Views from Around the Temple of Apollo

From there we had a picnic on another overlook in Delphi, then we headed for a very long bus ride to Metiora, where we were going to spend the next night. The goal was for us to arrive to Metiora after dark, thus eliminating the possibility of seeing the view, which we were told by Peter (the founder and director of KIVUNIM) to be unreal. Metiora is sort of like the New Jersey of Greece, very industrial and car dealership and auto shop one after another. So on this point, there wasn't anything to do in the town, so it was a pretty quiet night.

Day 5: We woke up, packed up and left (sensing a theme here?) and headed to the Metiora monasteries. The monasteries were nestled into these huge geological cliffs that had occurred after years of erosion, and earthquakes. Once again the pictures of this will speak louder than I am able, but do know that it was absolutely incredible.

The Monasteries

After the monasteries we were en route to Thessaloniki where we were going to spend the next three nights, but on the way we stopped in a small town called Veria. Veria once had a thriving Jewish population but after many years, as well as the Second World War there are virtually no Jews remaining. The current mayor of Veria has taken it upon himself to restore the synagogue there and to try and keep Jewish locations in suitable shape as a monument to the prior Jewish populations. We visited the synagogue and had a brief service (the only time the synagogue is ever in use is when KIVUNIM comes once a year) and then we went to clean up the Jewish cemetery in the town. The sad part about the cemetery is that in the sixties the town built a sports complex over the graves (there are literally graves and tombstones beneath the basketball court). There are still some tombstones along the side of the hill but the whole place was littered and unkempt. Again, every year KIVUNIM comes and cleans up the cemetery and says Mourners Kaddish. It was an eerie sort of feeling with this dichotomy of headstones and athletics on the same plot of land.

After the cemetery we headed to Thessaloniki. That night we had dinner on our own again, and we were all somewhat exhausted from the day that we went to pretty much the closest restaurant. The thing about Thessaloniki more so that anywhere else we had been to yet in Greece, was that a very small percentage of the people spoke English. It was really weird actually. I mean I knew I was in a foreign country, I mean Israel is a foreign country but the language barrier had never been nearly as striking as it was in Thessaloniki. It was a moment were it hit me, sharply, that I was in a foreign country, with a completely different culture. Which was not a bad feeling don't get me wrong. But anyways, dinner tonight illustrates this point. The restaurant we went to had zero English speaking staff, so trying to order and additionally trying to figure out what some dishes consisted of was a struggle. My goal was to not order meat (I ended up ordering stuffed potatoes, which had ham in it, I didn't eat the ham) and it was near to impossible to communicate this idea. Regardless the food was delicious. From there we headed back to the hotel, too tired to go exploring.

Greece [and Bulgaria]: The beginning

This will be one of many blog posts about my recent trip to Greece and Bulgaria. To preface the next several posts, the trip was absolutely amazing. Every place that we went to was unlike any other places I've ever been to (this was my first trip to Europe).

Day 1: We left Jerusalem as about 3 o'clock on Sunday morning (the 8th of November), in order to get the airport for a 7 o'clock flight
When we arrived in Athens we were all a bit bleary eyed, and the realization that we were in Greece hadn't quite sunk in. On our way to the hotel, our tour guide realized that today was the day of a major marathon, and the main streets (on which our hotel was located) was closed. This posed a little bit of a problem, and we had leave our luggage behind for the time being, and take the Subway to the hotel. The train station is Athens was one of the cleanest stations I had ever seen, it was quite beautiful. We finally made it to the hotel, had lunch, then walked to the Acropolis and the Parthenon. The view, the sights, the building, everything about it was incredible. It was unreal to be standing at the foot of the Parthenon, and have everything I've learned since 6th Grade came flooding back. This is when it hit me, that we weren't in the United States, or Israel. We were in Greece and we were standing at the foot of history (The pictures do not do it justice).

The Acropolis

View of Athens from the Acropolis

After the Acropolis we went to the Greek museum, then to dinner, but by this point everyone was pretty much faded from all the travel, and it was an uneventful night.
Day 2: Today we visited a couple synagogues, one Ashkenazi and one Sephardic. Both were spectacular but the Sephardic one had just been recently remodeled, and was new, and wood paneled and very beautiful.

Newly Remodeled Sephardic Synagogue

From there we went to the Jewish Museum of Athens. This museum contained the entire history of the Jews in Greece, going back centuries, dating pretty much up until the present. There was a small section on the Holocaust as well.
Background Information: Close to 90% of the Jews in Greece perished in the Holocaust. Most of them were from Athens and Thessaloniki (which we would visit later in the trip). Due to this, the Holocaust section of the museum was very somber, and was a sort of dim lit room with a lot of personal artifacts.
From the museum we went up a cable car to the top of a mountain and ate lunch over looking the entire city of Athens. Then we returned to the hotel, at which point we were on our own for dinner. I as well as some friends, on the advice of the hotel staff, went to this small family style Greek restaurant that was delicious.
Another thing to mention is that our hotel had a 9th floor restaurant that had a completely breathtaking view of the Parthenon lit up at night. So, that evening I spent some time up there.
Day 3: We packed up and left Athens, our end destination for the day was Delphi, but there were several stops along the way. First we went to Chalkida a small city about 1.5 hours away from Athens. Chalkida has a Jewish population that dates back 2,000 years. We met with two community members at the synagogue there, and they told us a little bit about the community and the congregation. Because of Chalkida's proximity to Athens many Jews in the area go to Athens for regular prayer, and go the Chalkida synagogue for High Holy Days. Due to rain, our stop at a Jewish cemetery had to be canceled and instead we had lunch on a pier in Chalkida right on the water (which was also gorgeous) and then made our way to Delphi (Home of Apollo the sun god, and the Oracle of Delphi) for the night. Along the way we stopped at this overlook, and although it was completely freezing the view was incredible (you may notice a theme, that everywhere we went to was so incredibly beautiful. I'll put pictures up, but they don't do it justice).

Skyline from overlook on the way to Delphi
City (Not Delphi) On the Side of the Hill (From the overlook)

After all my trip posts are up I will post a link to a Picassa web album with more pictures.