Heading for home, Kindertransport member and Gaza protester Hedy Epstein, resources.

Kindertransport member Hedy Epstein is staging a hunger strike on behalf of Gaza Strip residents.

In a few hours, a cab will take us to Ben Gurion Airport and begin our return trip to Chicago and the United States.

The past two weeks have been rich and meaningful on many, many levels-personal, emotional, spiritual, historic, and linguistic are only some of them-and the three of us are all sad to leave.

In an example of the country’s remarkable diversity and continuing, and, at times, seemingly intractable, controversy, former Kindertransport member Hedy Epstein is beginning a hunger strike to protest against Egypt’s refusal to allow a Gaza solidarity march to proceed.

Like Epstein, my father and uncle are among the 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland whom the English government permitted to enter after Kristallnacht in late 1938.

I have written before about resources about the Kindertransport, and Epstein appears in Deborah Oppenheimer’s Academy Award-winning documentary Into the Arms of Strangers.

Gaza and the West Bank have been contentious since the moment the Israelis took them after the 1967 Six Day War-a conflict that Michael Oren chronicled effectively in his book, Six Days of War.

In the book, Oren makes the point that many of the top Israeli leaders had not considered what to do with the West Bank and Gaza-areas called Judea and Samaria by some Israelis-because they had not anticipated such a rapid or comprehensive victory.

Some, including Moshe Dayan, advocated returning the lands.

At this point, some may say decision could have averted the deaths of thousands of lives on both sides during the past 42 years.  Others would say that Israel has a historic claim to the land, that victors in war deserve the spoils they gain, and that conceding territory would not lead to enduring peace.

As the decade enters its final few hours, I hope that both sides can manage to forge an agreement that will lead to the end of the hostility, barriers and bloodshed.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Temple Mount, Brothers Karamazov

Worshippers kneel at the site where Christian tradition says Jesus' body was prepared for burial in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

In our penultimate day in Israel, we returned to Jerusalem and navigated our way through the intricate maze of the Old City-Aidan was by far the most adept of us-to get to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount.

It’s an oft-noted fact that Jerusalem is unique among cities on the planet in that it has some of the holiest sites of three of the world’s major religions.  Amos Elon, among others, writes at length about this in Jerusalem: City of Mirrors, which I read shortly before coming here.

As always, though, knowing from hearing and reading is different from directly experiencing.  So, after a brief snack, we braved the rain, the elderly Italian woman who kept pushing Dunreith in the back and the security guards to enter the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina.  We were not allowed to enter the Temple, but got a feel for its dazzling gold dome and intricate mosaic tile exterior.

We then did a combination of map reading, direction asking, and plain hoping before arriving at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  Upon entering, we saw worshippers kneeling and kissing The Stone of Unction, the spot where tradition claims Jesus’ body was prepared for burial.

The sights, and the fervent belief of the people we witnessed, was another reminder of what makes Jerusalem so unusual and why the struggle for control of the city has been so protracted and intense.

In that vein, I’ve also started The Brothers Karamazov, widely acclaimed as Dostoyevsky’s greatest novel. I’m just about 70 pages into Ivan, Dmitri and Alyosha’s gathering and discussions with Father Zossima about faith, human nature, Church and State, and other light matters, and I’m optimistic that I’ll keep making headway on this classic tomorrow and during our long, long flight home.

This may well be my last post of 2009.  Many thanks to all who have read and commented. I look forward to continuing the conversations in 2010!

Cameri Theater, Damascus Gate, Semi-Pro.

Robert Stone shows the pull Jerusalem has on many different people in Damascus Gate.

We had a relaxed day here in Tel Aviv, shopping again at the Carmel Market, walking for hours to find the Cameri Theater that our dear friend, Holocaust survivor and writer Ava Kadishson Schieber helped found 60 years ago,  and visiting with her daughter Shira, son-in-law Rami, and their four children.

Aidan plugged away on his research paper comparing Upton Sinclair and Andrew Carnegie’s responses to industrialization while we were roaming the streets and, at night, had a unicycle lesson from Shira and Rami’s adopted son, Nimrod, our tour guide for Hebron and some of the West Bank settlements.

After the lesson, I continued reading Damascus Gate, Robert Stone’s panoptic look at Jerusalem’s inexorable pull on an enormously wide range of people.  The book is set in the early 90s, during the first intifada, and follows a wide range of characters who all in some way are seeking spiritual or political or moral direction in Jerusalem.  I’m not sure if I’m going to make it to the end, and it has been a lot of fun to read about places we have already been or plan to visit soon.

We also caught the end of Semi-Pro, the Will Ferrell flick about an ill-fated fictional team in the pre-merger ABA.  In The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons includes some information about the league and some of its top players like Dan Issel and Artis Gilmore in his five-leveled pyramid of the 75 greatest players in basketball history.

Our time here is winding down, the inevitable return to the Chicago winter beckons, and I am feeling some sadness on both accounts.  Nevertheless, we will make sure to get as much as we can out of the next two days-I’m getting my unicycle lesson tomorrow night after we return from Jerusalem-and my strong sense is that we will return.

Haifa, Kibbutz Usha, O Jerusalem

Dunreith stands in front of the building at Kibbutz Usha where she lived as a volunteer in 1986.

We had another full day of travel today, this time returning to Haifa, Israel’s largest port city with a series of upward climbing roads and clouded views that reminded me of San Francisco.

After a tasty sandwich and coffee, we walked around the Ba’Hai Temple and its spectacular gardens before heading north to Kibbutz Usha. Dunreith lived there in 1986 and 1987, and had not been on the premises in 20 years.

Fortunately, Anita, one of her best friends from that time, was still there and available to spend some time with us at the beginning of her shift at the kibbutz’s Optiplas factory.

We also walked to the kibbutz’s graveyard, where Mendel, Dunreith’s kibbutz father and a partisan during World War II, lies next to his wife Tzippora.

Nearly all of the country’s kibbutzes have changed almost completely-some would call it a near palimpsest-since their original days of claiming territory toward building the Jewish state Theodore Herzl envisioned after witnessing the Dreyfus trial in the mid-1890s.   Not unlike the end of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Usha now pays its workers wages, does not have collective child rearing, has dropped its payments for health insurance and are in the process of making the homes on the property privately owned.

Both Haifa and the kibbutzes appear in the books I have been reading about Israel.  Martin Gilbert’s history of Israel had some material about the kibbutzes’ founders-Usha was heavy on Holocaust survivors, while others had more of an Eastern European flavor, not that the two categories are exclusive-while Collins and Lapierre’s O Jerusalem talks about the importance of Israelis securing Haifa while battles raged in other parts of the fledging nation like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

I finished the seminal work yesterday, and must say with confidence that it is very likely to appear in my Top 10 list for 2009.  Written in a cinematic style with a dizzying array of characters whirling in front of the reader, O Jerusalem conveys the epic drama, the pitched battles and the blood soaked land that resulted from what Israelis termed their War of Independence.

The authors tilt toward writing from a pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli perspective both in their inclusion of characters, in the narrative trajectory they adopt, and, some would argue, in their closing invocation of hoping for peace between the warring sides (Some pro-Palestinian people might say that stance is begging the question of moral accountability for the actions).   That said, Collins and Lapierre neither back away from the history’s brutally unsavory moments, like the massacre and rapes at Deir Yassin, nor do they write in a triumphalist manner about Israeli’s coming into existence.

The book is absolutely rife with gripping details, whether it’s David Ben-Gurion crying for the first time in his adult life after denying a childhood friend’s request for guns to keep the people under his command alive, or Dov Joseph’s desperate plans for survival in Jerusalem as Abdullah Tell’s plan to squeeze the city into submission appears to be bearing fruit.

Collins and Lapierre’s work is essential background reading that I wish I had encountered when I was younger.  I’ve started reading Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate at my mom’s cousin Gary and Amy Marcus’ recommendation, and the novel will be hard pressed to top O Jerusalem.

RIP, Dennis Brutus.

Activist and poet Dennis Brutus died on Saturday at age 85.

South African poet and anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus died yesterday at age 85.

Brutus was instrumental in pushing for the exclusion of South African sporting teams from the Olympics and other international competitions-a movement that served as a backdrop for Invictus, the recently released film about the Springboks’ 1995 Rugby World Cup victory.

He also elegant, haunting and beautiful poetry.

My personal favorite is the poem, Somehow We Survive, which serves as the title for Somehow Tenderness Survives, Hazel Rochman’s anthology of works by Southern African writers.

Somehow we survive

Somehow we survive
and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither.
Investigating searchlights rake
our naked unprotected contours;
over our heads the monolithic Decalogue
of fascist prohibition glowers
and teeters for a catastrophic fall;
boots club the peeling door.
But somehow we survive
severance, deprivation, loss.
Patrols uncoil along the asphalt dark
hissing their menace to our lives,
most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror,
rendered unlovely and unlovable;
sundered are we and all our passionate surrender
but somehow tenderness survives.

He will be missed.

Heading to the Negev, Ben Gurion’s Grave.

Dunreith places a stone on David Ben-Gurion's grave.

Our Israeli odyssey continued today, this time with a southern desert twist.

Today the Yannay family took us to the Negev desert, where Israeli patriarch David Ben-Gurion-also known as the father of the country-retreated after his first departure from politics.  A plaque near the entrance to Ben-Gurion University proclaims his commitment to make the desert a livable place.

Others have taken up the quest, as one of the world’s top desertification-the effort to make deserts sustainable living spaces-is based in the Negev.

Martin Gilbert’s history of Israel and O Jerusalem by Collins and Lapierre and Michael Oren’s book about the Six Day War all talk about Ben-Gurion and his role throughout Israel founding and first decades.

UPDATE:  I wrote yesterday about driving through settlements in the West Bank.  The shaky alliance between Abbas and the Israeli military took a big step backward after the military killed six Palestinians in response to a Jewish settler being killed earlier this week in the Gaza Strip.

Christmas in Jewish settlements and Hebron, O Jerusalem

The wall between Palestinian and Jewish settlements is a reminder of how far away peace is in the region.

A soldier explains some of the history of the Cave of the Patriarch as a religious family emerges from prayer.

We spent the day today with Nimrod, Rami and Shira’s adopted son, an Israeli army veteran and one of the world’s top unicyclists.

Nimrod took us to meet Amir, his wife Massuah (I am not sure about the spelling) and their three boys in one of the many Jewish settlements outside of Jerusalem and in the West Bank.

We also drove to Hebron, site of the murder of 29 Muslims by Baruch Goldstein in 1994.  The Jewish and Palestinian settlements, which are separated by barbed wire and a wall in many places, are both nearer the road and more intertwined in Hebron than in other places.

While at Hebron, we visited the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Sarah and Rivka, among others, are buried.

Life was quiet today in Hebron and in Jerusalem, but it was not nearly so peaceful 62 years ago today, when fighting broke out to contest ownership of Jerusalem and the state of Israel as a whole.

That war went to the Israelis, and, unfortunately, the wars have continued since then.  Israelis we’ve met have talked about the need to defend what is theirs, especially in the face of a series of hostile nations that surround them and a number of whom are committed to their being driven into the sea.  On the other hand, the Palestinians talk about the oppression they’ve experienced at the hands of the Israelis, and see the settlers as land grabbers making a play for de facto for possession being the basis for continued  ownership.

It’s hard to see a way out soon, and meeting some of the settlers and reading Collins and LaPierre’s O Jerusalem helps me understand a bit better the passionate fervor and historic basis for the conflict that thus far has eluded resolution.

Jerusalem Sights and People, Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre’s O Jerusalem.

Dunreith and Aidan in front of the Wailing Wall.

A spice vendor in Jerusalem's Old City.

Michael Thaler shares knowledge while walking us to Jeusalem's Central Bus Station.

We went to Jerusalem’s Old City today, navigating the streets in the Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Armenian quarters to get to the Wailing Wall.

One of the last links to the First Temple, the Wall had dozens of black-jacketed men separated by a divider from women who also moved reverently and placed slips of paper with prayers on them into some of the wall’s thousands of cracks.

We had arrived in Jerusalem in the late afternoon, initially walking around some of the ramparts before descending and making our way to the Wall.

We tried later to get to the Temple Mount, but were too late.   We plan to see it on our return, as well as to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the Stations of the Cross.

Jerusalem’s unique status as home to three of the world’s most influential religions has often been noted, and today was no exception as I made that point to Aidan.

After leaving the Old City, having a quick bite at one of the Cafe Hillels that populate the city and Aidan purchasing some chocolate at Roy’s, Dunreith and I took the proverbial trip down Memory Lane.  We walked past the Great Synagogue and to the Prima Kings Hotel on King George V Street, where each of us studied separately at Yad Vashem-she in 2005, and me in 1999.

Memories of listening to hundreds of hours of lectures, walking the streets of Jerusalem and dipping into the Old City flooded me and left me grateful that we had returned.

On our way to the bus to return to Tel Aviv, we were consulting a map when Michael Thaler approached us and guided us to our destination.

An observant Jew who was born to Holocaust survivors on a Russian kibbutz at the end of World War II, Thaler first came to Israel in 1971.  A veteran of the American and Israeli armies-he served in Vietnam, in the Yom Kippur War and in the First War in Lebanon-he has paid the ultimate but all too familiar price in this country for the love of the land: his daughter was killed in a suicide bombing in 2001.

During the course of our conversation, Dunreith shared that she worked for Facing History.

“But does it make a difference?” he asked, echoing Aidan’s exact words from the night before.  ”Does anybody really care?”  He painted an analysis of the region’s woes that certainly would appear to be shared by Shira-the world is against the Jews, the United States is more supportive of the Arabs because of their political interest, and the nation needs to defend itself.

“It all goes back to 1948,” he said, after praising Aidan for his astute question.

Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre go back to just before 1947, when the United Nations vote to accept the creation of Israel and the subsequent British withdrawal meant that blood flowed on the very streets we walked today.

They tell the dramatic tale of this momentous period of history in O Jerusalem.

I’m about 100 pages into the book and enjoying it a lot, even as it is making me feel wistful that I learned so little of this history during my religious education at Temple Sinai in Brookline.

Collins and Lapierre have gripping material and characters to work with, and so far appear to be capitalizing on the opportunity presented them.  I’ll keep posting as I read more, and one of the powerful images of the first section I have read is of fabled Israeli patriarch David Ben-Gurion not joining the ecstatic dancing of so many other Jews after hearing the United Nations’ decision because he knows that war is imminent.

All in all, another rich and rewarding day.  Tomorrow we plan to head to Ein Gedi to float in the Dead Sea and enjoy some of the pleasures available at local spas.

Carmel Market in Tel Aviv, Michael Oren’s Account of the Six-Day War

We had a generally mellow day today, reading, resting and witnessing the timeless flow of commerce at Tel Aviv’s Carmel Market.

As you can see in the pictures, the market has everything from cathedrals of carefully placed strawberries to rows of hookahs to green yarmulkes with the words “Israeli Army” stitched on them to the largest blocks of halvah I’ve ever seen.

The stand’s owners hawked like some of the finest I worked with and near when I was selling Green Monster and Bleacher Creature T-shirts for the D’Angelo family on Fenway Park’s Landsdowne Street in the summer of 1990.

Calling out to us in heavily accented English-”Hello, my friend, come here,” giving tiny samples of pomegranates, and very likely overcharging us based on their accurate assessment that we are not natives, the vendors fulfilled time-honored traditions of the customer-seller relationship.

I loved it.

Forty two years ago, the future of Tel Aviv and the rest of Israel was in serious doubt.

Surrounded by hostile and seemingly united Arab nations, Israel pulled off a spectacular and lightning-quick victory in June 1967 that both led to its boundaries growing by three-and-a-half times and set the conditions for much of the bloodshed and downward shift in world opinion that has followed.

Today, I read Michael Oren’s Six Days of War, which provides the back story for, build up to, and consequences of, Israel’s landmark victory.

Oren writes in the introduction that he set out to change how people wrote about the conflict by incorporating analysis of the military campaign with the war’s social and political consequences.

I enjoyed reading this energetically written and intricately researched work.

Among many salient aspects was a reminder of how towering a figure Yitzhak Rabin was in Israel’s first 50 years as a nation.  In this period, he nearly suffers a nervous breakdown before pulling himself together, and, along with Moshe Dayan, leading the army to victory.

Rabin was assassinated a short distance from here, and I am confident we will get there before we leave.

Oren also writes about the fight for Jerusalem that took place during the conflict.

We will be heading to the Old City tomorrow morning.

Israel trip continues, big Snow in New England, Bill Reynolds’ book about the 1978 Red Sox

This view from a Carmelite monastery outside of Haifa is a far cry from what folks back in New England are experiencing.

It’s Day Three here in Israel, and today we went up to Haifa and other cities in the North, near the Lebanese and Jordanian borders.

I understand that back home in New England folks have been blanketed with snow in what is rapidly being called The Blizzard of 2009.

In my childhood, the Blizzard of ’78 set the standard for all that followed and that, in my mind, never really exceeded, even if the total inches of snow fallen was greater than in my seventh grade year.

The snow started on February 5 and did not stop for a full day.

Mom sent us to school anyway until the ruddy-faced crossing guard roared for us to go home.

We did. And stayed there for weeks.

Eventually, we  no longer bothered to turn on the radio to check if school was cancelled.

I still remember seeing snow on the ground in early May.

We had just six days of schools in February and ended up having to add time at the beginning and the end of the day to end the school year on time.

I loved it.

Bill Reynolds writes about the Blizzard of ’78 in his book about the 1978 Boston Red Sox’s one-game playoff with the New York Yankees.  Also the author of Fall River Dreams, a look at what high school basketball means to Fall River, Massachusetts, Reynolds in this book examines the political, social and racial realities of late 70s Boston.

I wrote about the book earlier in the year.  If you’ve got a few days due to this year’s blizzard, check it out.

Check out Bill Reynolds' book if you've got some time due to snow.