He Was a Day Tripper

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June 28th, 2007
Today I went on a tour to Zichron Ya’akov with my program from the Jewish Agency. It’s not much of a program really. We never see each other ever except for the rare event or tour, and this was my first one. I met some cool people, but I’ll probably only hang out with very few of them outside of the program.
Zichron Ya’akov is a nice little town in the Carmel Mountain area of Israel. It’s up in the north by Haifa. It was the center of the NILI organization, which was the Israeli group that spied on the Ottoman’s for the Brits, and pretty much guaranteed Allenby a victory in Palestine. Read all about it here.
The town was basically funded by the French Baron de Rothschild, who named it after his father. He set up a nice winery there, which still exists. I got to tour it right after I toured the original homes of the NILI members.I also spent some time on the Kibbutz of a German-based Christian Zionist movement, whose name escapes me at the moment. They believe that Jews are indeed the chosen people and they've basically come to enjoy the ride. At the end of the tour of winery there was a taste test. Usually they’re pretty skimpy with the taste testing, but they gave us about 3 full cups of wine each. The town is pretty much a vacation area nowadays, because there are a lot of cute little houses and shops, but some people live there all the time.
After that we went to the extremely scenic kibbutz of Sdot Yam for dinner. We didn’t have enough time in either location, but both were beautiful. By the time we got back I was exhausted, and I’m really looking forward to our next tour in the Ein Gedi on July 13-14th.
Ciao,
Marcus

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