Less than 30 days after riots were set off by Israel’s opening of a new entrance to an archaeological tunnel alongside the Temple Mount, Cheryl Lebow found herself in almost the center of the controversy. Almost.
A leaky pipe prevented access all the way through to the new entrance.
However, for Lebow — a first-time traveler to Israel from Antioch — visiting the tunnel in Jerusalem’s Old City was nonetheless marked with political and spiritual significance.
“Historically and politically, it piqued my interest to go there after so much publicity. And especially after Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert pointed out there was a 36-hour delay from the opening of the tunnel to the reaction by Palestinians,” Lebow said.
“Maybe the tunnel wasn’t the issue but the pretext to allow Yasser Arafat to make a stand with Benjamin Netanyahu.”
Lebow’s voice softened, and she added, “The tunnel was also spiritual for me. The Wailing Wall is really the extension of the retaining wall of the Second Temple. This is where we pray. In the tunnel, we got to the closest point of the extension.”
Lebow is one of about 60 travelers who recently returned from a Jerusalem 3000 mission hosted by the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay and sponsored by a number of East Bay agencies and synagogues.
Travelers on the largest East Bay-based trip to date customized their visits by focusing on either modern or historic Israel. They supplemented their choices with visits to locations highlighting the arts, archaeology or other special interests.
Some visited “must-sees” like Masada and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum, while others toured the Israel Museum and visited artists’ studios.
In addition, each morning rabbis Mark Diamond of Oakland’s Temple Beth Abraham and Eliezer Finkelman of Berkeley’s Congr-gation Beth Israel led optional study sessions. Guest speakers included Olmert as well as mystic Rabbi David Zeller. About 20 attended each session.
“This was at 7:15 a.m. and it was optional. So this is pretty exciting,” said Jamie Hyams, community services director at the federation’s Center for Jewish Living and Learning. She added that Ami Nahshon, the federation executive vice president, “said we’d probably never do a trip without the study component again. That’s a big statement.”
Stuart Director, a first-time visitor from Portland, Ore. — who joined the mission with his wife, Nikki, his mother and his sister — said the study sessions, coupled with a guided tour led by former East Bay shaliach (Israel emissary) Amnon Gideon, helped fuse the mental, physical and spiritual experiences and “made us feel a part of Israel today.
“We’re talking about places thousands of years old, events and people you read about in the Bible. But we’re living right now, learning in Israel,” he said. “I realized human nature is the same” from era to era — whether discussing “the Bible, man’s relationship to self, to God, to woman, children, money, nature. The only difference I see is that then they rode donkeys and now we take 747s.”
Nikki Director added: “Looking around, I realized these are my Jewish people. This is my past, my present and my future. I understood for the first time what was Palestine, what was the home of the Jews and then we spread out. That is our home and we’re all connected.”
Other highlights for Nikki Director included visiting a moshav and seeing tomatoes growing in the sand, attending a rehearsal of the Israeli Philharmonic and taking a jeep ride to the Golan Heights.
Lebow also noted the jeep ride, led by Gideon, as integral in forging her connection with the country.
“I was sitting directly across from him as he described his feelings and what he remembered of the ’67 war, of the tank runs up the Golan in the ’73 war,” Lebow said, recalling “the intensity of his experience. You look at the bunkers where the Jordanians were shooting. The Israelis were sitting ducks.
“Only love of the land inspires someone to do that. And Amnon allowed us to feel his Israel — and to truly feel like Israel is the homeland for all Jewish people.”