High times in Haifa.

.טובות חיי חיפה

Happy Sukkot! After Yom Kippur, we had one day of "class," which comprised a trip to Tel Aviv with my Israel seminar group. Our primary points of interest were Independence Hall and the Palmach Museum as we explored the "New Jew" through the hundred-year history of Tel Aviv. Then, we were ripe for Sukkot break!

Many of my classmates have done extensive traveling during this break, exploring the Middle East and parts of Europe. Jessica and I, however, decided to stay in Israel and do some touring in Israel. Our destination of choice: Haifa. (For photographs from our trip, visit Jessica's Google album.)

We got a somewhat later start than we anticipated on Tuesday morning, but as we didn't have any particular plans for the trip (very unlike me!), we weren't too concerned. Since this was the first day of Sukkot, the buses weren't running - so we had to take a sheirut (shared taxi) to Tel Aviv and then another to Haifa. On our way to the place near Jaffa St. where the sheiruts congregate, a taxi driver asked us if we were traveling to Tel Aviv. We said we were, and he offered to drive us for 30 shekels apiece (roughly the same as a 10-person sheirut ride). We agreed as we figured it would be much faster to find two more people going to Tel Aviv than to wait for one of the vans to show up. After about twenty minutes, our taxi was full, and we tore out of Jerusalem. Our driver was apparently very anxious to arrive, as he was traveling at times twice the posted speed limit. We tried not to get too nervous and waited out the (rather short) ride.

The sheirut ride to Haifa from Tel Aviv was (thankfully) uneventful, and when we arrived in the city, we asked for directions to Jaffa St. (where our hostel was located). Twenty minutes and several more sets of directions later, we had found a guide to walk us to Jaffa St. and to point us in the direction of our hostel.

The Port Inn was a clean, professionally-run hostel that served a hearty breakfast and was home to a great deal of diverse travelers. It has a small kitchen, a TV room, and an outdoor patio for people who want just to relax at their home base for a while, and the staff was very friendly and helpful. We were warmly welcomed and given a terrific map of Haifa that we were to use extensively for the next 48 hours as well as a coupon book that we tried unsuccessfully to use at dinner. Overall, we were quite pleased with the hostel and would recommend it to visitors on a budget (~$27.00/night including breakfast).

Our first order of business was to visit Jessica's second cousin twice-removed, Shlomo, who made aliyah some thirty years ago from the U.S. Shlomo is very much into geneaology and has a personal family tree containing over 4,100 names ... including Jessica's! Shlomo contacted Jessica over a year ago looking for information about her family, and he mentioned that if we were ever in Haifa, we should look him up. So we did just that!

Our plan was to go straight to his house after we arrived. So, armed with our map, we set out. We passed run-down apartment buildings, empty streets, and abandoned shops. Turns out we were walking through one of Haifa's slums. After about an hour, we reached a busy intersection and, as we weren't exactly sure if our map was going to be able to show us how to get to Shlomo's house, we decided to take a taxi. It drove us up a big mountain (with which we were to become intimately familiar) and dropped us off at Shlomo's house. Good thing we taxied!

The door to the building was locked, and we knew that Shlomo kept the chag, so we didn't know what to do. Rather than shouting at the building and hoping he would hear, we decided to buzz him - what else could we do? He shouted down from the window, and we told him the door was locked. He came down, and the visit began!

We had a very lovely time with the Rapoports. They served us lunch in their sukkah (which, due to the high winds, was actually a somewhat dangerous place to sit!), and we chatted at length about family, Israel, Jewish history, etc. We met Shlomo's wife and their two sons and had the opportunity to see what a chag is like in a modern Orthodox Israeli household. After a couple hours, we bid farewell to Jessica's "new" family members and caught a taxi back to the German Colony (near our hostel).

Our friends Nikki, Rachel, Jessica, and Chad were also traveling in Haifa at the time, so we called them and plans to meet them in the German Colony for dinner. We walked around a bit, took some pictures, explored the one street of the Germany Colony, and were glad when our friends arrived. We had a great dinner and then made the same rounds that Jessica and I had made once or twice before deciding to ride the Carmelit, which is Haifa's version of a subway train, to the center of the Carmel region of town. We walked through the dark and not particularly friendly streets of north coastal Haifa to the southernmost station only to find that the Carmelit was closed. We sadly bid our friends farewell and made our way back to the hostel for some quiet reading and chatting before bed.

On Wednesday, we got an extremely good feel for Haifa. We started by walking an hour to the Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum, which focused on the story of Jews trying to move to Israel despite Britain's blockade on immigration. We saw a movie about the Af Al Pi Chen and other ships like it that helped to smuggle Jews into mandatory Palestine, and we explored an exhibit about the internment camps in Cyprus, where Jews who were turned away from Palestine waited (unknowingly) for the establishment of an independent, welcoming, and needy State of Israel. Although the museum wasn't great, it definitely provided more information than Exodus, and it serves as a memorial to a crucial part of the formation of the Israeli identity.

After the museum, Jessica and I sat on the shoreline for a while and then had a large and delicious lunch. We rode a sky cab to the top of a mountain, took some pictures, and then decided to walk down the mountain. We had a lovely walk, and we saw how buildings facing out from the mountain have long bridges built toward the slope so that the straight buildings can be entered from the side of the mountain. When we reached the bottom of the mountain, we once again found ourselves in the German Colony - only this time, we were able to enter the bottom level of the beatiful Bahá'í Gardens. (I don't want to go into great detail about the Bahá'í Faith and the significance of the Shrine of the Báb here, but I recommend following up on the links - the history and religion are fascinating!) We had tried to book a tour of the Gardens and the Shrine but were unsuccessful. Still, being in only the bottom part of the Gardens gave us a taste of the intricate and brilliant beauty supported by Bahá'ís all the world over.

As we had plans to meet Shlomo for dinner and still had some time to spend, we decided to walk through another part of town, check out a pedestrian mall, and see a different perspective of Haifa. We found ourselves in a "downtown"-like area and ended up in a park full of Russian men playing Chess, young boys having fun with dogs, and gaggles of Orthodox girls walking together. Then, still having more time, we decided to walk to the Carmel area we had missed last night. And that involved going up the mountain we had just recently walked down.

Our map showed several stairways that let us avoid long, winding roads, and Jessica and I set off on our trek. With each level of altitude, we took better and better pictures, and as the sun set and the wind blew, we knew we had made the right decision. By the time we had reached the top of the Bahá'í Gardens (which include 500-700 stairs), we were tired but familiar with parts of Haifa we otherwise would never have been able to see. It was a terrific walk!

Shlomo picked us up and drove us through the Carmel area. We did some geneaology work at his house (mostly Jessica and Shlomo talked about their family), and then we went to a great restaurant around the corner from Shlomo's house. I had "blintches," which are different from "blintzes" insofar as they're rolled (somewhat like manicotti) with different fillings, and Jessica had a delicious "hot salad," the likes of which we haven't come across in Jerusalem. We also had an enormous piece of chocolate cake ... because after all, we were on vacation! After tea at Shlomo's he drove us back to our hostel, and we crashed after a bit of "debriefing" on the patio.

On Thursday, we ate our breakfast with two Bahá'í pilgrims from Canada. Although they were very reticent during the entire meal, I wanted to learn as much as I could from them, so I tried to ask questions without being impolite. They shared when directly asked about their experiences that they had booked their pilgrimage five years ago and that they would be in Haifa for nine days. The nine day-long pilgrimage would involve about 100 people from all over the world and serves as a crowning experience in the religious life of Bahá'ís. I'd love to speak with people who have already gone - as they had just arrived, they didn't know precisely what they would be in store for. Nevertheless, I was thrilled to be so close to such a central religious experience, and I'm thankful I had the opportunity!

After breakfast, Jessica and I took to the train to the beach. It was cloudy and windy, so we decided just to walk along the shore instead of to sun and swim. There were thousands of beautifully polished rocks, and we collected about a dozen of them on our walk. After about an hour, we crossed the street to the bus station and headed back to Jerusalem.

So, our trip to Haifa didn't involve a tremendous amount of "tourism," but between our conversations with Shlomo and our walking (and a little driving) through a significant percentage of the city, we feel that we had an informative and enjoyable vacation. We have a history of doing a lot of walking in new places, but this sealed the deal: We officially love to explore places by foot! And though I was slightly sore on the bus ride back, I appreciate the opportunity to get so "up close and personal" with one of Israel's most important and well-known ports.

As Promised, Our Trip to Tel Aviv

Our trip to Tel Aviv began on Thursday afternoon when we packed up and made our way, via Egged bus, to the Jerusalem Central Bus Station - which is a madhouse on Thursday afternoons. After waiting on what seemed like an endless line, we finally got into the bus station, which is sort of part shopping mall and part bus station, bought tickets, and waited on line for our bus. We were pushed and shoved onto the bus in polite Israeli fashion, and sat down to enjoy the 45 minute ride, which went much faster than expected because of crazy Israeli driving.

We disembarked at the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. Which is CRAZY. The Tel Aviv Central Bus Station is supposedly one of the biggest in the world. It contains floors and floors of shops, office, buildings, etc. and an entire Shuk. There were more shoe stores in the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station than I think I've ever seen in my whole life. Wikipedia tells me that it has more than 1000 shops and restaurants. We had a lot of trouble finding our way out - the building is seven stories tall and our exit was on the fourth floor, but we couldn't find any signs to indicate that it was there. We had to ask a few times, and eventually we found ourselves on the Tel Aviv streets.

We walked, backpacks on our backs like regular hostel-hoppers, to our hostel, Sub kuk Malega, where we dropped off our belongings before going out into the city for the evening. The hostel is located in a sort of less-nice area of Tel Aviv, but not far from the nicer areas and quite close to Jaffa. On the bottom floor it is an Indian restaurant. The front room has a few tables, and a buffet, and in the back patrons recline on sheet-covered couches while they eat their lentils and rice. The second floor is a guest-house lounge - one computer with comlementary internet, live music every night, couches, a pool table. The third floor is the guest house, featuring two bathrooms, a refrigerator/sink area, two private rooms, and a dorm room (where we stayed) full of bunk beds. The shower, we were surprised to find, was no more than a shower head with a drain underneath, in the bathroom - no stall or tub - and there was a squeegee-like mop to use to push the water toward the drain when you have finished your shower. Not exactly the Ritz, but it was a place to sleep. On the fourth floor, the roof, rows of couches were set up facing a large screen where they projected movies, and you could order food and drinks from the bar on the roof as well. It was a pretty hip alternative kind of place, and we were quite excited about it, despite the showering conditions.

We dropped off our bags and headed for the city, not going anywhere in particular, but hoping to buy a map and then decide. It took us a while to find the map but in the meantime we browsed through a series of stores with colorful skirts, a few bookstores, etc. We walked through Nachalat Binyamin Market, and had dinner at a fabulous hummus restaurant there - we shared hummos and salad, and it was definately excellent. After walking around a bit more, we made our way back to the hostel, where we watched James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas on the roof, and then went to bed.

The next morning we were up bright and early - too early for the free breakfast offered by the hostel. We bought breakfast from a bakery on Allenby and then caught a cab to the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. The museum presents the history of Jews from the Destruction of the Second Temple until today, in a thematic (non-chronological) fashion). It begins with sort of the basics of Jewish life - family and community, and describes community organizations as they existed in various communities, as well as the celebration of holidays and the life cycle. Next, it moves on to the idea of faith, and contains 18 models of synagogues around the world - we spent a lot of time there, gazing at synagoges of all shapes, sizes and colors. We learned about Jewish art, architecture, and literature around the world, and we went to the 'return to Zion' area which included a model set of two family trees - one sephardic and one ashkenazic - that demonstrated how some of these extended family members might have ended up in Israel. There was a memorial area to all of the destructive events of Judaism's past, and we spent a lot of time reading the "Scroll of Fire" which had 365 pages in memorium to tragedies of Jewish history. We also walked through a bit of ancient history, where Daniel tried to decipher some ancient Greek (it was all Greek to me). We didn't get to see all of the museum because we had to get going to our next adventure, but we did get to see nearly all of it, and what we did see we of course saw in great detail.

Our next stop was to Habima, the national theater of Israel, to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolored Dreamcoat in Hebrew. We asked the taxi driver to take us to Habima, and he dropped us off by the Habima Quarter, where Habima used to be located, but, as we learned, is no longer found. We asked a number of different people including those inside the office of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, but they couldn't help us. We were getting pretty nervous about the whole thing when Daniel called Habima (he'd conveniently written down the phone number before we left, just in case) and the person who picked up directed us on somewhat of a long walk - off of the small maps given to us by the hostel - to a new building where Habima now performs. We arrived just in time to pick up the tickets and sit down before the show began.

Habima was one of the first Hebrew language theater groups, founded in 1918 under the Moscow Art Theater. It left the USSR in 1926 and came to Tel Aviv for good in 1928. Since 1958 Habima has officially been considered the national theater of Israel.

The show we saw was excellent. It was so much fun because we knew all of the words in English already so it wasn't a problem that we didn't understand all of the Hebrew. In the Elvis scene the actors made fun of Americans quite a bit, mispronouncing Hebrew in American accents, etc. The production was colorful and energetic, the dancing and singing were fabulous, and we had terrific seats right near the front. We were very pleased with the whole event, and were only disappointed that they weren't selling CD's.

After the show, we walked to Beit Daniel - the center for progressive Judaism in Tel Aviv. We got there quite early, so we went to a restaurant and had some dinner beforehand. Beit Daniel is very large and the congregation was quite full with people of all ages in attendance. The cantor was for sure American and had a lovely voice, and sang familiar (American) tunes. A guitarist accompanied her, and the rabbi had a melodic, sympathetic, deep alto voice. The service on a whole was really quite lovely.

We walked back from Beit Daniel to the hostel by way of the beach - meaning that we basically walked the entire length of the city. The beach at night was a bustling place full of big fancy hotels and folks out and about enjoying the cool(er) weather (Tel Aviv is very humid and felt much hotter than Jerusalem). We arrived at our hostel quite late, and went to bed.

In the morning we decided to wait for the hostel's breakfast, which was to be served at 9:00. We sat at the tables in the front, I did a little homework, and we read together from my book of Israeli short stories. 9:30, and still no breakfast. Apparently the cook hadn't arrived yet - it seems that most people who stay in the hostel don't wake up as early as we do. At 10:00 we were served a delicious breakfast of fresh Israeli salad, cream cheese, laffa, cheese, apples, honey, and granola. Full and happy, we went on a walk to Jaffa.

We passed many many many closed stores, it being Shabbat, and were a bit discouraged. When we finally arrived at Jaffa, we realized it was definately worth it, as the view of the Tel Aviv beach was absolutely astounding. Jaffa is an ancient port city, inhabited by 7500 BCE, and is mentioned a number of times in the Bible, for instance it is the site where Jonah took a ship to Tarshish because he was fleeing G-d's command to go to Nineveh and tell the wicked people there to change their ways. King David and King Solomon conquered Jaffa and used it to import cedars for the construction of the First Temple. The Maccabees captured Jaffa from the Selucids, and the Romans burned it during the Jewish Revolt, killing thousands of inhabitants. It was in Christian hands until it was conquered by Arabs in 636 CE and served as the port of Ramla. Jaffa was captured by the Christians during the Crusades, and there was a lot of fighting there during that time. In 1268 it was captured by the Egyptian Mamluks, and in the 14th century the city was completely destroyed for fear of new Crusades. In 1799 Napolean captured and ransacked Jaffa. In the 19th century Jaffa was an industrial area known for its soap factories, and was also the center of book printing in Palestine. Jaffa also became a center for citrus growing. In the late-1800's and early 1900's the population swelled considerably and suburbs were built that in 1909 were reorganized into the city of Tel Aviv. In the early 1900's there were many Jewish residents in Jaffa, but in 1920 and 1921 Arab anti-Jewish violence caused many to resettle in Tel Aviv. In 1936 the Arab leadership of Palestine declared a general strike which paralyzed the economy of Jaffa, and as the uprising continued many Arabs hid in the narrow hiding places of Jaffa. As a consequence the British Royal Engineers blew up homes and buildings in Jaffa. During the Israeli War of Independance, Israeli forces took over the largely Arab city. Today, Jaffa is home to a heterogeneous population and the old city area of Jaffa has become a tourist attraction full of souvenir shops and art galleries.

Daniel and I gazed at the terrific view of Tel Aviv from Jaffa, and then, like the tourists that we are, we walked through art galleries, and gardens, and took lots of pictures. We particularly liked the Art Nova Gallery, which is full of soft art paintings - pictures made out of colored fabrics and fibres.

It was hot, and we were tired, so we made our way back to the hotel around noon, grabbed our belongings, and took a shared taxi home. We arrived in time for me to take my take-home mid-term before bed.

I had trouble putting pictures in this post, so they are in the next one. Enjoy!