I forgot to mention in Part 1 that me and my friend Shira were heads of the food committee so we got to make the menu. So far we've gotten pancakes for breakfast one morning and french toast for one morning. We tried out a couple of new things, some of which worked, and some didn't, for example the Chinese food night didn't really work out. In this section of the Zeminar we spent some time up north.
Our first stop of the day was Atlit a prison for Jews in Israel. During the British Mandate, the British published the white papers which only let 15,000 Jews come to Israel in a year. Many Jews came illegally and when the British caught them, they were put in prisons. This camp held 3,000 people where men and women were separated but were able to visit each other. Many of the people in these camps were Holocaust survivors and after all the horrors that they just went through, here they were in another camp. This camp wasn't as bad because they got three meals a day and each person had their own bed, but it certainly wasn't what they were expecting when they made the decision to come to Israel, their homeland.
Next we went to the city of Aco. First we went to the Aco Jail for members of the underground movements who were caught. Many escape attempts were made. One of the major ones was that the people in the jail knew that the jail was built on top of a Turkish city so they thought that they could dig down to it and escape that way. They soon found out that under all the rock was sand and they weren't able to dig a tunnel through sand. Another time, a man by the name of Eitan Livni noticed that by the gas room where he worked was the roof of a Turkish bathhouse. He smuggled letters in the food and was able to smuggle in explosives. 41 people were able to escape through one of the windows. They escaped into two trucks but unfortunately, only one of the trucks was able to successfully escape and get to the nearby city of Haifa. In this jail, nine men were executed by hanging. Each of them went to his death singing Hatikva, the Israeli anthem of hope.
Towards the end of the day, we walked through the Arab market in the old city of Aco until we came to the shul of Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzato author of "The Way of God" and "Path of the Just." We learned a little bit about his history and the history of the shul and then we went to have dinner. Dinner was in a nearby kibbutz. This dinner was one of the successful ones that we planned. For the first time since we got to Israel we had a BBQ! There was chicken, hot dogs, and hamburgers and it tasted so good.
That night we slept in a pretty nice hotel in Tiberias. We woke up early in the morning to go down to the Sea of Galilee. It was way too cold to even touch the water but it was really nice to watch the waves gently lapping at the shore.
Our first stop of the day was on top of one of the mountains in the Golan Heights. This was one of the spots that Syrians used to shoot at Israelis in the valley below. Eli Cohen was a spy in Syria for the Israelis. He found this spot among many others that Syrians used as hideouts under Eucalyptus trees. He would report back all that he found to the Israelis. In 1965 during one of his transmissions to the Israelis, the Syrians caught him and he was hanged in the public square.
Our next stop was at an Israeli bunker on top of the mountain called Ben Tal. This was one of the first bunkers to see the Syrians advancing at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The stop right after that one was at a movie theater where we saw a video about Tank No. 77 fighting during the Yom Kippur War. Our next stop was at a beautiful memorial for the 72 soldiers killed in the helicopter crash in 1997. The memorial had a pool in the middle with the names of all the soldiers and paths extending from the pool like propellers. There were large rocks set up on plots of grass as a memorial surrounded by beautiful budding red flowers.
The last stop of the day was in Tel Hai. Tel Hai was one of four cities in the Golan Heights that was settled by Jews before the State of Israel was established. This specific city was mainly used for agriculture. After WWI this territory became part of the French Mandate who didn't care as much as the British about keeping the peace. These settlers were constantly attacked by Arab Bedouins. After they'd been having these troubles for quite a while, a man named Joseph Trumpeldor came to help them out. Two months after he came, the battle of Tel Hai broke out. 300 Arabs came to attack this little city of farmers. The farmers fought as best as they could but they knew that they couldn't defend themselves, especially after their leader, Trumpeldor had fallen. They decided to burn down the city and run away. Today, we remember their valiant efforts to fight for what was theirs because these Jews were the first fighters for Israel. This was the city where the Haganah was established.
It was a four hour drive home and I slept most of the way and of course there were bagels waiting for us to eat them for dinner. Shalom V'lehitraot!
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