For the next week we are on a Zionist Seminar to learn about the history of Israel by traveling all over the country to see different museums and hear different speakers. We started off with an introduction about the underground movements before the State of Israel was declared and their leaders. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, a name you see in the streets all around Israel, was the one who started the underground movement. He was the head of Revisionist Zionism. David Ben-Gurion was the first prime minister of Israel but before that he was the head of Labor/ Socialist Zionism. There were three main underground movements: Haganah (Palmach), Etzel, and Lechi. The Haganah was mainly a defense movement and they were very passive. The Etzel, Haganah's "enemy" was also defensive but much more active because they weren't afraid to use weapons. The Lechi was the bloodiest of the three and if they felt the need to, the would kill British soldiers, Arabs, and anyone else threatening them.
That night we went to visit the Achdut Yisrael Shul. One of the members spoke to us about how the underground movements used the shul to store weapons. On the wall were all the names of soldiers who died fighting so that we could have a state. There were 12 specific leaders who had a special place on the wall. They were caught by the British and hanged. Two of these leaders were captured in Egypt. The Jewish community in Egypt wanted to do something special for them so they wrote a Torah on deer skin. The deer skin Torah is now in this shul.
The next day, we went to the Palmach museum. The whole museum was an immersion experience, meaning it was like a virtual tour where we felt like we were in the underground movement too. We took this virtual journey along with a group of soldiers through forests, hiking Masada, sitting around the campfire, sitting at a cafe when the State of Israel was announced, and on a boat with Holocaust survivors making aliyah to Israel. After lunch, we went to Machon Ayalon, a kibbutz with a huge secret. Before the State of Israel was established, this kibbutz had a bullet making factory hidden 24 feet underground. It was hidden under a lundry room and a bakery to hide the noise and the smell. Every day, 45 men and women would go down underground and work for ten hours making bullets. They made each bullet individually by hand. In all the years that the factory was in operation, there was only one accident where a man accidentally cut off his thumb. In a very short amount of time, they made over two million bullets. In 1948, they no longer had to hide from the British so they took the machines out of hiding and brought them to Tel-Aviv.
We arrived in Tel- Aviv/ Yafo at around 10:30 and it was a beautiful morning outside. For just a few minutes we sat on top of a wall near the beach and soaked up some sunshine in the fresh air by the sea. We walked around for a bit and saw some really interesting things. There was a clock tower with four clocks and bars with pictures of boats and compasses on the windows to represent its history of being a port city. Tel- Aviv became a city more than 2000 years ago because of the ability to get food, travel, defend itself, and of course the water. King David was the first to conquer it. After the Jewish empire fell came Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, Ottomans, British, and it finally came back to us again. In the early 1900's Tel- Aviv was started by almost 50 families from Europe who had a dream of building up Israel. Next we went to Independence Hall. It was originally the home of Meir Dizengoff, the first leader of Tel- Aviv. Towards the end of his life he opened it up as an art museum with some famous artists such as Marc Chagall. This was also the place that they chose to officially declare the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. Last, we went to the Etzel Museum where we watched a movie about the underground movement and saw some really cool artifacts and models that they had.
The day ended back in Jerusalem where I accompanied my friend Steph to the ER. During the day, she tripped and fell and couldn't walk. Turned out that she was okay and it was just a sprain that would go away in a few days if she didn't walk on it. More adventures to come! Shalom V'lehitraot!
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