The Sahara and an extended bus stop

So after a very very very very long day of traveling on a bus and then a bumpy Jeep ride we arrived at this hotel in the Sahara. It was incredible. Each room was painted a different color and had these huge beds, with these netted canopies across them. And the stars there as well were amazing. Just not quite as much as the night before in the Berber Village.
The next morning we woke up early and most of our group took camels, I walked, along the sand dunes to the peak of this one from which we watched the sun rose. At that point it didn't matter that it had taken close to ten hours of traveling to get to this point, it was incredible, impressive and one of if not the best moments of the trip. At dinner the night before Peter Geffen (the director) had told us it was our choice if next year's Kivunim would make this trip. At that point we were all thinking, what kind could be worth so much traveling, and such a long day.
The next morning was more than worth it. We were all covered in sand and tired because walking along sand dunes is quite tiring, but the sunrise was incredible.

The Sahara, the dunes, the Sunrise and the camels

After we saw the sunrise, we packed up and left the hotel, and had the same bouncy jeep ride out of the desert. Today though we could see where we were going, and the jeep ride was a lot more fun. Our task for the day was to head to Warzazat, the Hollywood of Morocco for a night, before making the trek back to Casablanca the next for the flight home. In Warzazat it was a pretty relaxing night, nothing much to report on there. The next morning was our final full day in Morocco, and the only task for the day was to make it to Casablanca, which was a four-five hour drive. About two hours into it the brakes on our bus overheated while we were stopped at a rest stop. We had to wait several hours for a new bus to come. We were stuck on the side of the road overlooking mountains, and fields and beautiful scenery, but we were still stuck there for about two and half hours. We ended up arriving in Casablanca about two hour later than scheduled, and we were supposed to have a dinner with Jewish youth there, but seeing as how we arrived after ten o'clock they were all asleep. We had a quick dinner, then made our way back to the hotel for a brief night's sleep before boarding a late (TurkishAir is always late) plane which stopped in Istanbul en route to Israel.
Overall Morocco was absolutely incredible and wonderful and amazing.

A Berber Village, the Sahara and the Hollywood of Morocco

The last couple days of the trip were the most crazy and involved the longest time sitting on a bus, but they were also the most incredible. From Marrakesh we made out way to a small Berber village called Tillhouette. Along the way we had been invited to attend a Hillulah in another small village. A Hillulah is a celebration that occurs on the day of the yortzeit (anniversary of the death) of a Rabbi or another important Jewish figure. Unfortunately I don't even remember the name of the Rabbi of the one we attended. I do remember the village though. It was a very small village, donkeys were everywhere. We wound our way up to the crest of this hill, on which a small Jewish club resided. The main feature of the Jewish club was the graves of these two Rabbi which had been built after a donation from a wealthy Jewish man in Marrakesh. A (now) old woman, who was there, was told in a dream that this was where the graves had to be put, and thus they were built there. After the Hillulah when we were making our way back down to the bus, I and two friends got caught in the middle of a sheep herd. We thought there were going to run into us and we were going to be doing a hot potato dance to avoid being trampled but it was like oil and water, they just moved around us giving us a wide berth of space.

The Sheep Herd

From there we traveled to this village; Tillhouette. It was a very long bus ride and then another hour or so in these rickety vans because the roads became to narrow for the bus to transverse. We arrived in this small Berber village and because of the trek it took to get there I am sure it is not a popular tourist spot. We toured a Cashbah (castle or fortress) which was honestly just a really really cool old building.
Then we sat around a fire with many of the local villagers. The Berber women performed dances and songs, and encouraged/forced all of the Kivunim females to join them. It was quite unreal, it looked like something you'd see in a movie.

Local Berber Child

Cashbah

There was this one hotel, I guess you would call it there, and that's where we all stayed. They made us a home cooked meal very similar to the one we had had the night before, soup and couscous. And then the evening was hours. There wasn't much to do in this village but oh my, the stars there were magical. There was no light pollution from anything, so just a black sky and an absolutely gorgeous array of stars. It was so amazing. I could have lied there forever, if only it wasn't so cold.
The next day we packed up early, took the vans back to the bus and settled in for the longest bus ride of the trip to the Sahara. Along the way we stopped at a gorge, which was quite striking. A small stream ran down the center, and on either side loomed these huge cliffs.

The Gorge

But it was nothing to what were going to see in the Sahara. The extensive day of travel ended with an hour Jeep ride in the desert to the hotel we were spending the night at. It was pitch black and we could not see where we were going in the slightest.

Shabbat in an Emperial City

The next three days were spent in Marrakesh, one of the imperial cities in Morocco. This was Thursday (night), Friday, Saturday and then we left Sunday morning. Because most of the time in Marrakesh was on Shabbat and we are a Jewish program, we didn't do all that much.
Thursday night we arrived in time for dinner, and time to explore the square. The square is this huge, and I mean huge square bustling and hustling even late at night (I think we walked around in at 11 or so). There are hundreds of people and even more vendors who all want you to buy stuff from them, and will shout somewhat random things in English just to try and catch your attention. I think I was called the names of several pop princesses (Miley Cyrus among others) and was asked if I would be willing to marry one of the vendors. On top of the vendors there were small children who would follow you trying to sell you whichever item they were peddling. When we refused to buy tissues, etc. off of the children they would become violent and begin to kick or attempt to throw punches. We had a native Moroccan as a security guard. He would mutter a couple words to the children in either Arabic or French and they would run off.
On Friday we visited the Mellah (the Jewish ghetto) of Marrakesh. All but four families have moved out and now live in other places around Marrakesh (there used to be thousands of Jews there, and now there are only a couple thousand, of which not that many are religious). We went to a 600 year old cemetery, the most recent grave is from this millennium. Then we returned to the square we had visited last night and went to a pharmacy. Rafi (our guide) knew this pharmacy that sold everything from fish spices to oil that after rubbing it on your temples would relieve stress and a headache. After this we roamed the square and went shopping! During daylight it was not nearly as overwhelming and packed as it was the night before which was a major plus. Then we had to make it back to the hotel in time to prepare for Shabbat. As a surprise when we left the hotel to take the bus to Shul, instead of a bus there were six our so horse drawn carriages that had been ordered to take us to the synagogue. So that was fun.
Saturday was a very low key day with services in the morning, lunch and down time until later than evening when we went to our local Marrakesh guide's house (Jamal was his name for dinner). Jamal is a religious Muslim but he allowed us to have Havdalah there and then we were all served dinner. Their house was incredible, huge rooms, with lots of pillows and space. We fit (all 46 of us) quite comfortably in several of their rooms. Here we had another traditional meal, that was absolutely delicious. Soup, this flaky bread type thing that was filled with vegetables and home made wonderful couscous.
Unfortunately my camera was not with me for any of Marrakesh so I do not have pictures to share.
So instead I will share a brief history lesson. There used to be tens of thousands of Jews in Morocco and all but about 3000 have moved out of Morocco, most of them to Israel. The Jewish community is dwindling still. It is customary that when kids become of age they leave Morocco for higher education and it is rare that they come back. This trend is even more prevalent among Jewish teens because their parents are able to send them abroad. As an additional note those Moroccans who emigrated to Israel were not treated very well. Because of how close the Jewish culture is with the Muslim culture within Morocco, the Moroccan Jews brought many Arab customs and in some cases even the language with them to Israel. Here they were regarded as lower class citizens and it was often the Moroccan Jews who got involved in crime and prostitution. This didn't help their social standing either. In recent years they have been more accepted, and they are not still on the bottom of the food chain, but during the waves of emigration post independence it was not that great to be a Moroccan Jew in Israel.

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.