Hey all,

In the last few days, we have gone to 2 major tourist spots. They are completely different, but at the same time related.

The first one was the Old City of Jerusalem. Unfortunately, I forgot to charge my camera battery, so there won’t be pictures till I head back there. I love the old city. The narrow streets, the people selling goods, all the crap that you can haggle for, etc. The streets are so narrow that there are very few cars in the old city. At the same time, it’s incredibly touristy. If you’re Jewish, you go to the Western Wall…Christain you go to the Church of the Holy Sepulechre, and Muslim…Temple Mount. So there really is a major holy spot for the big 3 religions.

So of course, we had to stop at the Western Wall. For those that don’t know, the Western Wall is over 2000 years old and ‘was merely a retaining wall supporting the outer portion of the Temple Mount, upon which stood the Second Temple.’ Most of what I say is only my (Chad’s opinion) and Jessica will probably have a very different viewpoint. The reason why it’s a holy place now is that it’s the closest spot that Jews can get to where the Second Temple once stood….2000+ years ago. Other than that…it’s just an old wall. Maybe it’s just my own issues, but I just don’t see how this one wall can be more holy then walking through a forest, sitting on a mountain top, enjoying a view in the desert, etc.

If you never been to the wall, it’s an experience. First, they separate the men and the women. 3/4 of the available wall space (and the section that would have been the closest to the Second Temple) is for the men, and 1/4 is for the women. Now I have an incredibly hard time with this. Just can’t see why one gender can be ‘more important’ or even holier then another gender. That’s probably why I’m reform and have no issues being married to a future Rabbi. I could go on a long rant about this, but I won’t. As a male, the moment you walk close to the wall, you will get accosted by very religious Jews who want to put religious items on your body and say a prayer. It’s a commandment in the Torah, but ends up being just another tourist photo. In fact, that was the hardest part for me. If you go to church, would you walk around taking tourist photos, or would you try and be respectful and discreet?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Old City for it’s history. It’s hard to believe that there are areas of this city where people walked over 2000 years ago. It’s hard to even fathom that number. Just sit back and close your eyes and picture the wagons, and people hawking their goods, etc. It’s pretty amazing.

So the next day, we went to Yad Veshem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. If you’re thinking about going, you must mentally prepare yourself to be emotionally beaten, stomped, put through a food processor and then spit back out. Once you think the pain is done….they do it a few more times. It is an emotionally exhausting day. The Memorial itself is the best one I’ve been to. The main building walks you through the rise of the Nazi Party through the liberation and rehabilitation of the Jewish people. It’s very modern, and has video interviews of survivors throughout the museum. In fact, if we sat down to watch them all, we’d probably still be there. The pictures and stories are hard to hear, but what they do is humanize this event that is just too hard to describe. I can’t even begin to describe the horrors that these people, my cultural ancestors, went through and somehow survived. At a certain point, the stories made it so human, that I was picturing the horror and what would it be like if all of us had to live through this atrocity. Let me tell you, it’s not a fun line of thought. Would we try to be hero’s, just go along with it, hide, rob for food, etc?

What it proves to me is that no human being deserves to live in fear because of who they are, their religious choice, their culture, gender, etc. It sucks even more that 6 million people had to die to teach the world a lesson about discrimination, and while we have come a long way…we still have truly learned the lesson. Genocides still occur, discrimination based on race, culture, and gender still exist. Someday….someday…

The 2 rooms that were hardest for me were the Hall of Records and the Children’s Memorial. The Hall of Records is a circular room full of binders telling the story of a Jew that was murdered in the Holocaust. I couldn’t stay in the room. 6 million is a big number. Now think of all of the experiences that you’ve had, all of the people that you’ve met, all of the joys and sorrows you’ve experienced. All of those just simply wiped away in a furnace or by a bullet. This Hall was designed to tell those stories…or what little of those stories still exist. There is a room in the back that survivor’s or the family’s of people that were murdered in the Holocaust can go and can archive their pictures and type up their stories of the victim’s so that they will never be forgotten.

The Children’s Memorial is even worse. It’s worse becaus of it’s simplicity. 1.5 million children died in the Holocaust. The room is a dark room with a single candle reflect millions of times throughout the room. A single voice slowly naming the murdered children’s names. The candles message is simple, not only were the children murdered, but those children would have grown up and had more children. Simple, yet painful.

So I wish this journal entry were more exciting and less depressing. I’ll have to upload some pictures of the market at some point, because that is always more of a fun experience.

Hope all is well and that you remember the line…’Never Again!’.