Our
morning began at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum. Daniel and Shayna hung out
with Itzik, because you have to be at least 12 to enter the museum. This museum brings you thru the story of the holocaust with
personal stories, photographs, and artifacts – such as a large pile of shoes
that the prisoners took off before being gassed to death. Before the main
building, there is a maze of walls with the names of European cities where jews were taken from carved
into the walls. The shape of the maze is the shape of Europe. The museum
building is a triangular prism that cuts thru the mountain. There is a sliver
of glass along the top edge that represents the fact that this all happened
while the world was watching.
As
you can imagine, this is a very moving place. As you walk from room to room,
the story depicts the psychological and physical degradation of the jewish
people. First, the Nazi’s took their homes and their belonging and moved them
to ghettos, where they were poor and starving. Imagine being a very smart and
successful lawyer and having your home and personal belonging taken and being
forced to live in a ghetto. Then the Germans destroyed the ghettos, placing the
jews on hot crowded buses, to the concentration camps. Here, the Germans took
their clothing, hair, and lastly, their names, branding them with numbers
instead. You had to show your number in order to receive food. The somber mood
of this museum continues to get darker and darker and at the end, it brings you
to a circular room with walls that are lined with black binders, starting lower
than the floor and reaching higher than the ceiling. These are filled with the
names of people who died during the holocaust.
In
this room, Ben participated in a twinning program where they pair him with a
child his age, from a town in Russia that my great grandparents lived. We all
had tears in our eyes.
From
here we drove to Tel Aviv and spent some time at Carmel Market. We love seeing
markets in different cities all over the world. We took lots of photos and
bought olives, figs, dates, brazil nuts, etc.
We
ate dinner at Maganda (Daniel, Shayna, Max and Dave at chicken hearts).
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