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Published: September 5th 2007
On June 20 we departed for Israel on our long anticipated pilgrimage to the Holy Land. One of the precepts of the Bahá’í Faith is that each believer should try to make a pilgrimage to Bahá’í holy places at least once in their lifetime. Unlike the pilgrimages of other faiths, Bahá’ís must make a request for pilgrimage to the Universal House of Justice in Haifa. The UHJ is the nine-member body that governs the Faith internationally. Once you have made that request, you are placed on a waiting list, which usually takes about five to six years. This insures that the nine-day experience is maximized for the Bahá’í believers, who are given wonderful tours, with well-trained guides and have the opportunity to spend time with other Bahá’ís from all over the world who speak the same language. The most important aspect, however, is ample access to all of the Bahá’í shrines and holy places.
We departed Johannesburg via an air carrier we had never flown before, Ethiopian Airlines. This involved an evening flight to Addis Ababa where we arrived in a huge terminal that had shops of all kinds that were open for business most of the night. There were
a number of very interesting Ethiopian restaurants and gift shops. African airports each have a quite distinct personality to them, much more so than those in the U.S. Of particular interest to us were the shops that sold wonderful Ethiopian crafts and gold and silver jewelry. To our surprise, all of the handsomely crafted pieces of gold and silver were sold by weight and not by the design quality of the individual piece. Sherri bought some earrings for herself and an handsome Ethiopian silver cross for her mother.
After a five-hour wait, our flight to Israel departed in the early morning, and we arrived mid-morning at Ben Gurion International Airport. Going through customs appeared to be rather easy. This is not necessarily true for individuals who travel alone or young men of Middle Eastern background. At customs, we requested that our passports not be stamped with an Israeli visa stamp as we had been told that it would create a problem for us later if we ever traveled to Muslim countries. This all went well until we went to pick up our rental car and found that without the entry stamp, we could not prove that we were not
one of the many U.S. citizens who held a dual citizenship in Israel. The stamp was important to the car rental company for taxing purposes, and they refused to rent us a car without it. This led to an odyssey of going from place to place at the airport, two hours of dragging our luggage around. We finally got the required stamped form and could pick up our car and drive to Tel Aviv.
As a part of our prolonged stay in the airport, we bought a map, which made our trip into the city relatively painless. We arrived at the Centre Hotel in the heart of the Tel Aviv and immediately took a midday nap to recover from all-night flight. By mid-afternoon we set out on foot to explore the city and find the beach. Upon arriving at the beach, I spent the afternoon teaching Sherri how to body surf the Mediterranean, and I got a bit sunburned; Sherri insisted on sunscreen. I gave Sherri a hard time about being the only woman on the beach who was wearing a one-piece swimsuit. We walked back to our hotel via a different route and enjoyed the very different personality
of Tel Aviv from that of Johannesburg. We noticed quite a number of women walking alone after dark, something we don’t see or recommend in South Africa. Later that night, we stopped at a woman’s swimwear shop, and for the first time in many years, Sherri bought a lovely two-piece swimsuit. My wife is such a babe!
The following morning we had breakfast across the street in the beautiful Cinema Hotel, which was owned by the same company as our hotel. The Cinema was the first movie house built in the newly growing community of Tel Aviv in the 1930’s. It was designed in the German Bauhaus style by Jenya Awarbuck in 1939 and was built by two of the leading citizens of the city, Moses and Esther Nathaniel. The Cinema has wonderfully preserved the history of the building as well as the history of Tel Aviv, particularly the area around Dizengoff Circus, the busy central intersection upon which it sits.
After breakfast, we again headed for the beach and some more exploration. After more sunscreen, we walked south along the beach to the old city of Jaffa. On the way we stopped and toured the Museum of
the I.Z.L. The I.Z.L, an acronym for the Irgun Zvai Leumi, or simply Irgun, was one of the Jewish underground military organizations that fought against attacking Arabs and the occupying British from 1931 to 1948. The Irgun had been under the command of the late Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, who had been the Irgun’s Commander-in-Chief. The museum is dedicated to the 41 fighters who lost their lives in 1947-48, in the Irgun’s efforts to capture the city of Jaffa, which they accomplished on the Day of Declaration for the State of Israel.
As we approached Jaffa, the old defensive wall around the city and it’s minarets became increasingly impressive. The city has a small harbor that had historically discouraged invaders because of the treacherous reef that surrounds the harbor. Visiting vessels are required to anchor outside of the reef and have passengers ferried into Jaffa via small boats that can navigate the reef. It was on the rocks of the Jaffa reef where Andromeda was believed to have been offered as a sacrifice to the sea monster and from which her lover, Perseus, rescued her.
It was from the port of Jaffa that Jonah departed, in his
hope of escaping God’s command. He was, of course, eventually thrown overboard by the crew who believed he was bad luck and was then swallowed by a whale.
Jaffa was conquered by the Egyptian Pharaoh, Thutmose III, sometime between 1800 and 1600 B.C.E.
Around 960 B.C.E the cedars of Lebanon were brought to Jaffa by order of King Solomon for the building of the Great Temple of Jerusalem.
During the Crusades, Jaffa became called the Port of Jerusalem, for the many Christians pilgrims who arrived in the Holy Land by sea and would begin their journey overland to the Holy City.
After his conquest of Egypt, Napoleon captured Jaffa and left 40,000 dead inhabitants of the city after an outbreak of bubonic plague. After failing to capture the port city of Acca (current day Akko or Akka), Napoleon retreated to Jaffa and eventually back to Egypt and then France.
In more recent times, it was around the city of Jaffa that the first fruit trees where planted that led to the “Jaffa Orange” becoming the standard for Israel’s thriving citrus industry.
This remarkable city is a constant place of investigation for archeologists and historians.
Its winding and narrow streets are now a mix of restaurants, artist’s studios, dive shops and tour companies. These are mixed between Christian churches and convents, old Muslim mosques and Jewish hostels. On the Wishing Bridge of Jaffa, all of the zodiac signs are cast in bronze as a part of the railing. It is said that if you hold your zodiac sign and make a wish, that your wish will be granted.
We paused to have a late lunch in a small restaurant that overlooked the harbor of Jaffa and offered us a refreshing breeze and shelter from the intense sun. Then we explored the narrow old streets, taking pictures and chatting with an artist minding a ceramics shop on behalf of her cooperative. She both lives and works there, as do all the members of the cooperative. She mentioned that there are a number of such arts co-ops in Israel, some in kibbutzim.
By mid-afternoon we started walking back to Tel Aviv and our hotel. We stopped for another swim in the Mediterranean, and Sherri successfully body surfed several times, although the two-piece swimsuit was a distraction that required frequent readjustments. I’m sure it was also
a distraction for many of the male swimmers in the area as well. Afterward, we arrived at the hotel exhausted, having swum an unknown distance and walked an estimated ten or twelve kilometers in the sun. Sherri had been wearing her South African bush hat to protect her from the sun, but after getting it wet in the ocean, it had changed shape and was looking less like a hat and more like an exotic mushroom.
During our time in Tel Aviv, we could not help but reflect on the differences we observed between Israel and our current home in South Africa. Certainly both countries have very diverse populations. Israel’s population is drawn from the world wide Jewish diaspora. We heard Russian, Italian, Arabic and other languages spoken here, but everyone also spoke Hebrew. While South Africa’s population is also a mix of different groups speaking 11 official languages, most of these languages are indigenous to the country. Most black South Africans speak multiple languages - at least 3 or 4 - and in the townships we find several languages melded into common dialects that are understood by most residents. Israel does, however, have a large middle class that
has easy access to the necessities of life while there are stark differences between the haves and have-nots of South Africa.
Israel appears to have managed the country’s unification and commonality of purpose through mandatory military service. This has been born of necessity due to the constant external threat to the country since it’s inception. It is this threat that has led this country, of only 6.5 million people, to require military service for all young men and women. Young people in uniform are seen everywhere and receive training in the history of the country as a part of their service, visiting holy places as well as historical sites. We often encountered groups of uniformed young people receiving lectures and tours at various sites throughout the country. South Africa, on the other hand, remains at odds with itself and continues to discover its personality since the collapse of apartheid only 14 years ago. In South Africa, everyone has a sense of their own ethnic perspective but little understanding of how that fits within the greater South African milieu. A common identity continues to evolve.
The requirements of military service and the notion of external threat, finds Israel with
an abundance of public firearms, a well-trained police force and very low levels of public crime. South Africa, however, has a large police presence, as well as many private security companies, and an even larger national crime problem. Much of that crime is quite violent and involves the use of illegal guns and the police are often viewed as being a part of the crime problem.
Both countries are alike, however, in that they have problems in providing service, both public and private. This appears to occur in Israel as a result of the fact that individual responsibilities are clearly, and perhaps overly, defined; the individual is often discouraged from taking the initiative in solving problems that may be outside their area of responsibility. In South Africa, it occurs as a result of poorly trained individuals and the lack of a qualified work force in many areas. When confronted by a problem in Israel, people would simply tell us that it was somebody else’s responsibility. In South Africa, people try to help because it is the polite thing to do, and no one wants to say they don’t know how to solve the problem. The end result in either
case is that it is often hard to get things done.
What remains as a distinct joy for us in South Africa, is the willingness of the people to smile, joke and converse with one another. It is easy for us to talk with strangers there, while our efforts to talk with Israelis, was often met with a cool response. This is something that is seldom the case with the people of South Africa.
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Jan Moslehi
non-member comment
Thank You
Thanks for the interesting narrative and wonderful photos ! ! Looking forward to your next post.