Israel Day 2 - Tank Museum & Caves at Tel Maresha

Israel day 2
June 29, 2007, Friday

Ron Beer, our guide, picked Dianne and I up at 10 am and we went to Elliot the moneychanger. This is cool; a guy from New Jersey that moved to Israel and converts currency from his apartment. I did not plan far enough in advance to trade dollars for shekels. When I went to the bank at home to get shekels I was told they are available, but a 5-day advance notice is required to order shekels. Euros are always on hand at home, but Elliot was able to trade easily at a fair rate, and we got about $800 of shekels. (By the end of the trip I still had over $300 worth of shekels.)

We left Jerusalem for Yad La’Shiryon Latrun, a memorial site for the Armored Corps with a museum in Latrun. The site vividly displays the work, commitment, and inadequate equipment the Israelis had available to secure their freedom against far superior equipment supplied by the Russians to the Syrians, Jordanians, Egyptians and Lebanese.

In 1948 when the U.N. offered the Jews a country, and Israel had to fight for its independence, British troops left in the middle of the night. They figured the Arab countries would just cut up the land that Jews had been purchasing for decades and drive out the Jews. And, no country was willing to sell arms to Israel because they wanted it to disappear. Israel was using these itty-bitty tanks that looked like toys compared to what the Russians were supplying other Arab countries.

Still, Israel survived. The Jews survived 400 years of slavery under the Pharaoh in Egypt; the attempted extermination by the Romans; centuries of pogroms in Spain, Russia, and other countries around the globe; the Holocaust in Germany; the abandonment of the British troops when statehood was granted; and the continual onslaught of its Arab neighbors for the last 60 years. There must be something to the Jewish people I did not understand; how the Jews survived for 3000 years under continual persecution and maintained the same religion, culture and language with no leadership, country or government of their own.

After Yad La’Shiryon we went to Bet Guvrin-Maresha National Park with the caves of Tel Maresha. Here we could see how Jews were able to live in the desert by building caves into the hills. The caves created a constant livable temperature, stored water and housed commerce like making olive oil. We saw ancient burial tombs that we not discovered until the 1920s.

There were also Carob trees at the site. The interesting thing about this is that the seeds are very uniform. So much so that they were used as weights to measure precious stones which are weighed as carats, based on the weight of the number of carob seeds.

We ended the day at an open-air food market back in Jerusalem on a Friday afternoon. Shoppers were buying for the Sabbath, merchants were yelling out what they had to sell. It was a glorious madhouse.

Dianne and I purchased some pre-cooked food that was being cooked in huge pots out by the street. All I could picture was the aftermath of eating this food. I pictured myself being chained to the porcelain throne after getting dysentery or something else from the lack of sanitary conditions. Dianne prevailed and we purchased plenty of food for 30$ (shekels), which was about $7.50 US. And darn it, it tasted great and I was fit as a fiddle.