Fasting and Starving.

Yes, this is an update of everything since...and until...now. (Ed. note: I lied. I got too tired. Sorry.)

Get ready--and keep in mind that I am writing this at 3 a.m. after having walked the (near)-span of Jerusalem today--for about the last 9 hours, actually, I was running for one of those hours.

Yom Kippur in Jerusalem

The entire city goes dead. It's "bike day" for kids--and they are out on the streets on bikes because no one (except maybe some police cars or ambulances) drives. Even the radio and television stations just go blank. Almost everybody is in white, and you can hear prayer all day. It is, in short, amazing. The most surreal part was singing what we always sing at the very end before going home to break the fast--"L'shana Haba B'Yerushalayim" (Next year in Jerusalem)...with the added word "Habenuya" (Rebuilt)--we are always striving for something more...


Har Herzl and Yad Vashem

So I saw the interactive museum at Har Herzl--it reads "World Zionist Center"--or some sort of name on the front, and it must be my Berkeley schooling that makes me somewhat shudder. What a pity. I think it'd be interesting to see peoples' reactions to that sign, because in essence, Zionism is truly the belief in a Jewish homeland, none of the other crap that gets attached to it. At least idealistically speaking.

Anyway, after being inspired by the Herzl Museum and visiting the graves of Hannah Senesh, Yitzhak Rabin, Herzl himself, Golda Meir, and too many other national heroes...(I couldn't get "Eli, eli" out of my head for a while), I headed over to Yad Vashem--the world's largest, most comprehensive, and newly redone (they added a whole new section) Holocaust, or Shoah, museum.

All I will say about this is that I have been fascinated and horrified (masochism alert) by the Shoah since I was in elementary school, and began devouring memoirs, autobiographies and other stories about it. (I was a cheary kid.) The new museum goes above and beyond the previous one, and is an experience--overload--in and of itself. Througout the exhibit there are testimonies from people who lived through the horrors--I remember one woman's tale of her mother and she and her brother hearing German boots in the hall, and a pounding on the door, the mother taking her two kids to a hiding place in the closet, and then opening the door while the kids listened on. "Raus, Schnell! they yelled at her to come along with them and she asked them to get her coat--they assented--and she went to the closet, told the kids to go to some family, and kissed them goodbye, grabbing her coat and leaving the apartment with their father. That was the last time they saw their mother.

There's another testimony from a man who is praying after the war for one single living relative. Not a soul remains. "I was alone on this Earth." All of this really puts things into perspective.

The most chilling moment for me--and there were many chilling moments--was looking at a list of "death camp-bound" Jews from Paris, France...looking at the lists with their names and addresses...All of them on the list (and there were hundreds) came from the small neighborhood and environs that I lived in while I was in Paris. I literally recognized the street names, addresses, I could tell you how to get to their houses--walking--from where I lived while I was in Paris. One woman "Ketty"--lived a block down from me on the same street. Hundreds of Jews within a 500 meter radius (if that). These were the empty holes of Ashkenazi Jews that I witnessed when I was in Paris. The Ashkenazi Jews on the whole were shipped off to death camps, and the Sephardic Jews now in Paris are mostly post-war immigrants.

I learned a lot, I felt a lot, and I thought a lot. At the end of five hours, I was tired, depressed--spent. I walked over to the gym and purged myself. (Figuratively speaking, that is.)