Jerusalem

Journal
Adventures in a Desert Landscape

Joan Campion

PublishAmerica
Baltimore
© 2008 by Joan Campion.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
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First printing

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the author intended, verbatim, without editorial input.

ISBN: 1-60672-843-1
PUBLISHED BY PUBLISHAMERICA, LLLP
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Printed in the United States of America

 To LEN BARCOUSKY
With grateful appreciation
 Author’s Note:
A Little About ADD
EVEN the least perceptive reader can hardly fail to
notice that I suffered a remarkable number of nervous
episodes, panic attacks, and related experiences in the
course of the journey related here. While the Middle East
has never been a relaxing or relaxed place for travelers,
my trip was taken in the late summer of 1978—a period of
great calm in the region compared to many periods before
and since.
Did I know I had a nervous problem before I got on the
plane? Certainly. I had lived with it all my life—and had also
lived with the illusion that someday I would get over it. That
did not happen on this journey, and it was years before I
even had a name for my problem—and realized recovery
never WOULD happen.
The name of the problem is Attention Deficit Disorder, or
ADD. Once it had a name I was able to look back and see
how it had dominated my whole life, beginning with my
childhood, and how it seemed to have dominated my
father’s life as well.
 ADD is not enjoyable, whether or not its victim knows its
name. Had I known that I had such a thing before I got on
the plane for the Middle East, I might not have gone. Labels
can be intimidating.
So I am glad I did not know its name at the time.
Otherwise I might have opted out of perhaps the greatest
educational and, yes, spiritual experience of my life.
It was well worth a little extra stress.
 Table of Contents

Foreword .................................................................. 13

Wings over a Wine-Dark Sea ..................................... 17

At the Hotel .............................................................. 23

Raouf Sa’ad Abujaber ............................................... 28

To Ar-Rajef ............................................................... 32

In the Village ............................................................ 36

To the Rose-Red City ................................................ 40

Crossing the Jordan ................................................. 48

On to Jerusalem ....................................................... 55

Wanderings in the Old City ....................................... 64

Encounters ............................................................... 71

The Theologian and the Immigrant Woman ............... 76

Bomb Blasts and Points of View ................................ 95

To Masada and Back .............................................. 113

My Dinner with Moshe, and More ........................... 121

Kiryat Anavim......................................................... 132

Wanderings with Tzipi ............................................ 165

More by Joan Campion ........................................... 179

 Some Special Supporters
…Carol Vickrey, Frank Podleiszek, Shirley Collins,
Kathleen McSparren, Nellie Manges, Marian Kayhart,
David Weick…
 Foreword

OVER THE CENTURIES thousands of writers of books

and memoirs have visited the Middle East. Many have
spent years getting to know this turbulent, fascinating
region, and their works reflect this intimacy. From Ibn
Battuta to Sir Richard Burton, Gertrude Bell and beyond,
their books all have one thing in common: they catch the
history of the Middle East, so mesmerizing and so
dangerous, at one historical point, the point at or about
which they are writing.
And that is the one thing they have in common with this
little work. “Jerusalem Journal: Adventures In A Desert
Landscape” began as my diary for a short trip I made to
Jordan and Israel in 1978. I lay claim to no particular
expertise, although I believe my interest in the scenes I
encountered will be evident.
I read a great deal before the trip, which also should be
evident. I would have preferred to know both Arabic and
Hebrew fluently before setting off alone on this journey.
But I had to content myself with a few words of modern
Hebrew, picked up from a very good teacher at B’rith
Sholom Community Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
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 JOAN CAMPION

Since I began this venture as a student of the

Holocaust, the book has a pro-Israeli bias for which I see
no reason to apologize. I am shocked sometimes by what
Israel has had to do to maintain itself, but I do believe it
has a right to maintain itself. I am shocked far more by
what its enemies have felt entitled to do, including the
sacrifice of their own children, in order to attempt to
destroy it.
Why am I offering this work to general readers?
Because everybody has limitations and biases, even the
greatest chronicler. Yet they offer THEIR observations, so
why shouldn’t I? In large part due to the internet, this is
the era of the amateur commentator. (Sometimes, frankly,
far too amateur for my taste. But I happen to believe I’m a
cut above that level.)
Also, when it comes to the Middle East it seems as
worthwhile to freeze a moment in time in 1978 as in 1878
or 878. And friends and colleagues have found the work
colorful and interesting from a human perspective. If is
nothing more than an adventure story, their reaction tells
me it also is nothing less. Therefore, it may be hoped,
people who enjoy adventure stories—and, thank heaven,
there are many such people—will also enjoy this.
Len Barcousky provided the catalyst for the trip
chronicled here. Additional sources of encouragement
included Rabbi Allen I. Juda, Cantor David Green, and my
Hebrew teacher Hadassah Nemovicher. Moral or material
help, in some cases both, came from the distinguished

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 JERUSALEM JOURNAL

Professor Alice L. Eckardt and her late husband, famed

theologian A. Roy Eckardt; the late Nora Levin, and the
late Addi Agar.
Without Jack and Tanja Howard I would not have been
able even to contemplate the act of writing in cyberspace.
It was they who, after my dabbling at the public library,
enabled me to gain a real foothold in the world of
computers. Later, Tanja helped me to produce the final
version of this memoir.
Thanks are due as well to Patricia N. McAndrew, the
editor of the work. She became intrigued enough, while
working on the manuscript, to wonder what had become
of some of the people I had written about. So she set
herself to find out; and as a result I am able to provide
readers with updates on many of my old acquaintances.
Additional editorial help came from Carol Vickrey. Any
errors left after she and Ms. McAndrew went over this
work are due, not to any limitations of theirs, but to my
limitations, the obstinacy of my computer, or both.
Special thanks are due to my long-suffering and
dedicated “tech crew.” Take a bow, Carol Yale, George
Taylor, Sally Handlon, and Jeannette Gartrell of
PublishAmerica, for pulling me through the computer
challenges.
I also wish to express my gratitude to Middle Easterners
who provided the flavor, insights, and kindnesses that
made this trip the rich, unforgettable experience it was.
Among them are Raouf Sa’ad Abujaber, General Mutlaq

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 JOAN CAMPION

Eid, Moshe Kohn, the late Dr. G. Douglas Young, Tzipora

Ishayahu and her family, and many others.
To all, and to those who come after them, one wish:
Salaam. Shalom. Peace. Alas, as I write this, the wish
seems further than ever from fulfillment.

14
 Wings over a Wine-Dark Sea

THE GREEK landscape had the hard beauty I had

expected—what little I could see of it. This was pretty
much limited to a Greek Orthodox-style church far down
and to the right of the scene. A few dark trees clustered
around its metallic-domed whiteness.
This was the Athens airport; but the famed city was
nowhere in evidence. At least not from my window of the
Boeing 727, nor from any other window through which I
could glance. The earth outside steamed and fumed with
heat that could be felt even inside the plane.
Regrettably, I had no time on this trip to visit the
historical and cultural sites of the Greeks. Flight 132 of
Alia, the Royal Jordanian Airline, had only stopped here
for refueling. We were due to take off within the hour for
Amman, the Jordanian capital. As for my ultimate
destination, it was Jerusalem, a city of greater historical
import than even Athens.
Uncounted thousands had died, laying claim to
Jerusalem. With a little more misfortune, the carnage over
the claim could be just beginning. Fundamentalists of

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 JOAN CAMPION

three great faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,

believe this carnage is inevitable. In the coming conflict
the Forces of Evil, variously defined—it depends on who is
doing the prophesying—will be destroyed, and the Holy
City will be saved.
It was a distressing outlook, especially since it involved
the end of the world as we have known it. I had come to
learn what I could of life on the anvil of history, and of
what people there were thinking about their existence in
this uncomfortable historical hot spot. I even hoped, if
possible, to influence that thinking when it seemed useful
to do so.
In short, I was out to help save the world.
I had joined this flight at Madrid, having got that far by
a TWA 747 out of New York. The 747 had been packed—
it was midsummer—and the Royal Jordanian Alia 727
was no less so. At best, air travel is uncomfortable; and my
trip had not been “at best.” Just too many people.
Still, I had enjoyed the flight eastward over the
Mediterranean. I even forgave the pilot a rather rough
landing in Athens, a performance he—or perhaps his
successor—was to repeat a few hours later in Amman.
None of us can be equally good at all aspects of our
work.
By the time we got to Athens I had already been without
sleep for more than 24 hours. Fascinated by the details of
the journey and the panorama of islands and sea that
unscrolled below me, I had fought to keep my eyes open.

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 JERUSALEM JOURNAL

Within hours, the strain of this effort would catch up to

me. Meanwhile, though, I tried to miss nothing that
transpired.
The ancient Greek poet Homer, I decided, had been
right in writing of the “wine-dark” Mediterranean. I had
never seen a wine this blue; but dark? Yes, without doubt
the sea was as dark as any wine I could imagine.
As we approached its eastern end, the number of
islands visible below increased, at least for the time being.
They were clay-brown, and laced with serpentine roads. I
wished I knew their names, so I could recall what mythical
or historical events had occurred on them.
Was this one Ithaca, the home of the wily Odysseus?
Was that patch of sea-girt rock Delos, where ruled the sun
god Apollo?
The islands tantalized with possibilities; but there was
no way to discover answers on the spot. The pilot helped
only once—he pointed out the large island of Cyprus, once
sacred to the goddess Aphrodite.
I didn’t get a very good look at it, though. As luck would
have it, it was not on my side of the plane.
The cloud cover had now started to become heavy.
Cumulus clouds piled up in huge, mountainous shapes,
so that for every island I saw I no doubt missed seeing at
least one other. One cloud, to my exhausted mind, took on
the appearance of a gleaming white house. For a few
moments I thought we would fly into that house and come
out in another dimension of existence.

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 JOAN CAMPION

It didn’t happen. Instead, we soon were flying over the

tumultuous Middle East. And now the captain was
saying, “That J-shaped area down there is Jerusalem, and
over there is Amman.”
Amman I would see soon enough. My attention was
fixed on Jerusalem. From here its most conspicuous
feature was the Moslem Dome of the Rock, gleaming
golden in the evening sun. The city was a stirring sight. I
could hardly wait to walk in its streets.
A few minutes later we flew in over the old Hejaz
Railroad—the same that Lawrence of Arabia had once
blown up, but in another part of its route—and jolted
down at Amman.
And now my exhaustion met—and failed—its first test.
The trouble started as soon as I presented my landing
card, passport, and ticket to a Jordanian officer.
“Tel Aviv!” the officer nearly spat. “You’re going back
through occupied territory!”
I snapped angrily, “I’m going over the Allenby Bridge!”
The marching and countermarching of bureaucrats
began at once. And my marching and countermarching—
in an effort to reach the “out” door of the airport terminal—
began as well.
Going as I was on nervous energy alone, I wore down
quickly. All the people jostling outside the building,
awaiting friends and relatives, seemed to be laughing at
me. Inside the terminal there were signs for immigrants,
for transients, for health, for customs, for security—for
everything, naturally, except general information.
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 JERUSALEM JOURNAL

(Looking back, I see that the window marked

“transients” was probably the place to go. But that seemed
likely to take forever; and at a time when what I most
wanted to do was fall on the floor and go to sleep. Besides,
I feared a second meeting with the officer I had
encountered earlier.)
I thought it would be nice to be able to get something to
eat and drink. But that would take money. I could not
exchange dollars for dinars because I kept getting jostled
out of line at the exchange booth. As I was to learn, both
in Jordan and in Israel, jostling was more or less the
regional Middle Eastern sport.
It was several hours before I managed to grab my bags,
bolt from the terminal, and find a cab to the Grand Palace
Hotel. I never did actually pass through customs—
something I hope could no airline passenger anywhere
these days could get away with. But I suspect it still
happens. Hopefully only innocent bunglers like myself
manage it.
Once I had arrived at the hotel and paid the cabby in
U.S. dollars, I checked in and went to my room. But not
before I had the desk staff call the American Embassy, so
rattled was I by my first on-site encounter with a foreign
culture.
All I wanted to do at that point was to run; yet nobody
had threatened or hurt me. I had merely been confused
and delayed. And, in the process, had contributed my
small, ignoble bit to tales of ignorant Americans abroad. It
is not a memory I cherish.
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 JOAN CAMPION

Yet I really was frightened. I resolved not to leave the

hotel room again until one of two things happened. Either
I would establish contact with the Amman Rotary Club, on
which I was supposed to write an article. Or I would
receive permission to cross the Allenby Bridge into the
West Bank and Israel.
At that point I didn’t care which happened first. But it
was Ramadan, the Moslem month of fasting, and the
embassy informed me that it would take at least 48 hours
to arrange the bridge crossing.
If so, it seemed likely to be the longest 48 hours of my
life.

20
 At the Hotel

IT WAS one o’clock in the morning Jordan time before I

took a shower and fell into bed. Less than nine hours
later—not much time, considering how long I had
previously been awake—I was aroused by an
unaccustomed sound. It was the braying of a donkey.
Where on earth was I? I lay in bed for a few moments,
scanning my memory. Then I crossed the room, pushed
the drapes aside, opened the sliding glass door, and
stepped out onto the tiny balcony.
Just below lay a school, a concrete block structure with
a sign in Arabic and English. Beyond were sparse
plantings of some crop I didn’t recognize, with clothing
tied on poles to keep the birds off. Between the school and
the planted rows I could see where the donkey was
tethered.
The land swept away to a horizon of barren hills with
smooth, rounded outlines—or outlines that once might
have looked smooth and rounded, seen from this
distance. Now they were studded with buildings, boxlike
multistory structures which looked as if they had been

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 JOAN CAMPION

put up by the housing authority of a major American city.

I was to see many such buildings, both in Jordan and in
Israel.
Off to the left was a group of structures which obviously
aspired to make an architectural statement—the stadium
and other buildings of the King Hussein Sports Complex,
as I later learned it was called. It was surrounded by many
acres of young evergreens. I wished this effort at tree-
planting luck. The barren hills were picturesque, but I had
no doubt they meant a hard life for many Jordanians.
The sky dominated the scene, hard, cloudless, and
brilliant. As I stood there, the sound of a muezzin chanting
morning prayers fell on my ear. No doubt recorded, and
coming from the minaret of a mosque near the school. Not
something I’d have heard on a summer morning, most
places in Pennsylvania. At least, not at the time this was
originally written.
I left the room soon afterward, despite my vow of the
previous night not to do so. I wanted to get some postcards
and letter forms—I suppose as a reminder that I had been
here. Who knows? I thought, If I send one or two of them
to myself, I might be back in the United States in time for
them to be delivered to me on my very own doorstep.
In the book shop, works by and about Lawrence of
Arabia and Sir John Bagot Glubb shared space on the
shelves. Glubb, or Glubb Pasha as he was called, was the
Englishman who had once commanded Jordan’s famed
Arab Legion. Some say the General, acting at the behest of

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 JERUSALEM JOURNAL

the British government, had arranged for the

assassination of King Abdullah, King Hussein’s
grandfather.
But could anyone—I mean, anyone who did not travel
in the inner circles of power—know for sure? For most of
us the air is full of whispers and shadows, especially when
it comes to the affairs of the Middle East. Perhaps the
whispers and shadows are the only reality there is.
Near the books by and about the two Englishmen,
space was given over to what looked like blatant anti-
Israeli propaganda. I shuddered, seeing it there. To me,
“anti-Israelitism” so called would be bad enough if it were
bigotry directed against any nation, let alone the nation of
the ever-persecuted Jews. To wish and plan for the
destruction of Israel, knowing the enormities that had led
to the need for the state, is anti-Semitism pure and
simple. So I believe.
Every time I tried to talk to someone in the hotel lobby
I regretted having come without a word of Arabic. If my
Arabic was non-existent—and known by me to be so—
everybody else spoke English after a fashion and thought
himself fluent. I bought a little book on spoken Arabic and
reflected on the mendacity of ministries of tourism in
assuring would-be visitors that English is “spoken
everywhere.”
True—in a way. The Israeli tourism authorities proved
to be as mendacious as their Jordanian counterparts
about this. In Israel, however, I was fortified by a few

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 JOAN CAMPION

hundred words of spoken Hebrew, which enabled me to

repay linguistic mayhem in kind. That was not true here,
alas.
In the course of the day my paranoid mood intensified.
I found out from the proprietor of Lawrence Tours in the
hotel that I would be very lucky to have my Allenby Bridge
permit a day later than even the American embassy
expected. The application would no doubt be delayed on
account of Ramadan, which I gathered slowed everyday
actions immeasurably—rather like a month of Christmases,
at least in its effect.
(As I may have already mentioned, Ramadan is the
great Moslem month of fasting. The fasting, one of whose
purposes is to teach self-control, goes on during the
daylight hours, and in the evenings the fast is broken by
hospitable parties. But one should not imagine Western-
style parties, with alcoholic beverages and designated
drivers. Observant Moslems do not drink alcohol, having
discovered it is possible to enjoy the company of family
and friends without it.)
I could not get in touch with Raouf Sa’ad Abujaber, the
former district governor of the Amman Rotary Club,
because I did not know how to use the hotel phone to place
an outside call. Nor, recall, did I have the language to ask
for help. I seemed stuck, just stuck. What could happen
next?
That evening I got sick. It was a costly development, but
it turned out to be the first piece of good luck I had had.

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 JERUSALEM JOURNAL

Not only did Dr. Twal know Raouf Sa’ad Abujaber; it

turned out that practically everyone else did. All I’d have
had to do at any time to gain prompt attention was to
mention his name at the hotel desk, or at Lawrence Tours
for that matter.
So much for finesse.

25
 Raouf Sa’ad Abujaber

ABUJABER arrived within minutes of Dr. Twal’s call.

He was a handsome, imposing man, one at whose behest
things got done—and that meant now. He ordered me to
get dressed at once, to go to dinner with the Amman
Rotarians. Then he left while I hurried to comply with his
instructions.
When I went down to the lobby the atmosphere toward
me had changed remarkably. The hotel manager was
there, and behaved with great courtesy. I don’t believe I
had met him earlier. The owner of Lawrence Tours was
there, suddenly sure I could have my permit for the
Allenby Bridge crossing by Monday, when I wanted it. I
think he had meant to do his best before, but expected it
to be difficult. I didn’t appear to have any connections.
From this sea change in people’s attitudes, I concluded
that Raouf Sa’ad Abujaber was someone to be reckoned
with in Jordanian society. And I was not wrong. The
founder-owner of five companies, including Jordan
Brewery, Jordan Dairies, and an insurance company, he
was a graduate of the American University of Beirut and
was honorary consul-general of the Netherlands.
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 JERUSALEM JOURNAL

Within an hour of his arrival at the Grand Palace Hotel

I was enjoying a wonderful Middle Eastern meal of veal,
rice, stuffed grape leaves and honey-soaked pastries in an
elegant home with formal flowered wallpaper and molded
plaster ceilings. The guests were Rotarians and their
families—handsome, elegant, well-dressed, well-traveled,
and no doubt as untypical of Jordanian society as the
Rockefellers or Kennedys are of American society.
The oldest guest, for example, was His Excellency
Anton Atallah—lawyer, former senator, former member of
parliament, and former foreign secretary. He had been a
leader in the life of Jordanian-held East Jerusalem, but
said he had been expelled by the Israelis following the
1967 war.
The conversation ranged from the opera productions of
Jean Pierre Ponnelle, to what Middle Easterners tend to
call politics. One man, I do not remember who, chilled me
with his exposition of the hard-line Arab point of view.
That viewpoint included the following sub-points:

• Israel was a cancer on the Middle East.

• The Jews had always brought persecution upon
themselves. At any rate they did not deserve a
state of their own because they are a religion, not
a nation.
• The Jews had infiltrated the Palestine Liberation
Organization and other such groups, and were
thus responsible for much of the terrorism in the
world.
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 JOAN CAMPION

• Incidents such as the then-recent poisoning of

Jaffa oranges destined for export from Israel
never happened; they were trumped-up Zionist
propaganda.
• Israel was an expansionist state, and there
would be war within six to nine months.

I was convinced the man believed all this to the very

depth of his being. A man who believes with all his heart
that he is telling the truth can hardly be accused of being
a liar. Basically, the struggle in the Middle East was a
search for some definition of truth that everyone could
accept. But was there such a thing?
Perhaps. But this man’s definition was not one I could
accept. So I said, “You can’t destroy Israel without
bringing the world down around your own ears.”
“Who’s talking about destroying Israel? We just want
our land back.”
I did not know what this meant in terms of the man’s
view of reality. By “our land,” did he mean the lands the
Arabs had lost in 1967? Or did he mean all the territory
that had formerly been the British-governed Palestine
Mandate? If he meant the former now, were the Israelis
justified in their fear that sooner or later he would mean
the latter? After all, there were many Palestinians—never
mind the famous ones like Yassir Arafat, head of the
Palestine Liberation Organization—who meant precisely
that. I thought of the officer who had challenged my travel

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 JERUSALEM JOURNAL

plans at the Amman Airport. For such a man, Jewish Tel

Aviv would always be in “occupied territory.”
At last I said that I could not wait to see the interesting
project the Amman Rotarians were doing. And left it at
that.

29
 To Ar-Rajef

BEFORE 8 a.m. the next morning Raouf Sa’ad

Abujaber, his two young sons, his driver and I were
careening down the Desert Highway that leads to the
distant southern seaport of Aqaba. My stomach knotted
each of the many times the driver roared out to pass a car
or a huge truck. Jordanian driving is maniacal. So, I was
to learn, is Israeli driving. Presumably there are highway
rules and regulations on both sides of the Jordan; but
they seem to be taken by many drivers as advisory rather
than binding.
We were on our way to visit a Bedouin mountain village
named Ar-Rajef, as well as the famous ancient Nabataean
capital Petra—the renowned “rose-red city half as old as
time.” If, I decided, we lived long enough.
I was not sure, yet, just what Ar-Rajef had to do with it.
Later I realized that the village was the site of the Amman
Rotary Club’s current community development project—
the project I was to write about for The Rotarian, if all went
well.
We proceeded at breakneck speed toward Ma’an, with
just one roadside stop for coffee, bread, and cheese. We
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 JERUSALEM JOURNAL

drove by herds of camels, sheep, small black goats, and

donkeys—whether wild or domestic I had no way of
knowing. Possibly some of each.
We passed people in varying combinations of Middle
Eastern and Western dress; passed Bedouin encampments
whose people lived in tents of black goat hair; passed a
water reservoir that had stood there at least since Roman
times. Soon, too, we passed Jordan’s phosphate-mining
region, and off toward the eastern horizon we saw a
phosphate-laden train lumbering off toward Aqaba. This
was not Lawrence of Arabia’s old Hejaz railroad, but a new
railroad with another purpose. I understood that the old
railroad had had two important purposes. To keep the
Turkish Ottoman pashas at Istanbul in touch with their
far-flung empire was the first. To carry pilgrims on the
Haj, the great annual pilgrimage of Moslems to the holy
city of Mecca was the second.
As far as I could tell, the railroad I was looking at this
day had a far more mundane purpose: to carry phosphate
to Aqaba. That, and that alone. Nevertheless, the sight of
a train, any train, in that landscape, stirred powerful
historical memories.
The railroad certainly didn’t seem to keep any traffic off
the highway. That was heavy with the smell of petroleum
fumes and a-crawl with autos, trucks, and busses. Every
single vehicle appeared to be driven by a lunatic.
More, and still more, Bedouin tents. I learned that,
although many of the Bedouin still live in tents, by and
large they now stay in one place. Nomadism was coming to
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be a thing of the past. Ar-Rajef, our destination, was in

fact a settled Bedouin village rather than an encampment.
At Ma’an we turned off into the mountains. Soon we
found ourselves on a tortuous blacktopped road that
seemed only a few years old. Tents again, and weather-
worn clusters of low buildings, many more black goats,
and donkeys in twos and threes.
“Up ahead,” said Raouf Sa’ad Abujaber, “is the Wadi
Aravah, which separates Jordan and Israel.”
This information left me none the wiser. But in a few
moments the car rounded one more curve, and I gasped in
astonishment.
Directly before us loomed a majestic chasm. It was full of
rose and gray rock formations patterned in light and shade
by the strong sunlight. So this was the Wadi Aravah! And
how could I have not realized it was here? It was like having
been ignorant of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado while
planning a trip to the American Southwest.
This place obviously meant something not only to
Jordanians, but to Israelis as well. As the car stopped and
I got out, approached the vast canyon, and peered in, I
thought of the old Israeli song that went:
Aravah is a barren land,
Built out of tears and sorrow.
Water flows in the desert sand,
Bringing hope for tomorrow.
But it seemed to me there could not be enough water on
the planet to moisten the sand and rock here.

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We stopped on the edge of the great canyon to take

pictures, and to have a little food. Then we resumed our
journey. As we drove, Abujaber pointed out the large,
modern house of Crown Prince Hassan. It stood on the
edge of the wadi, across from an outcropping on the Israeli
side that he said was the tomb of Moses’ brother Aaron—
revered by Arabs as Haroun.
And why would a prince want a house on the edge of a
great canyon in the middle of a howling desert?
“He likes to hike around here,” my host explained.

33
 In the Village

AR-RAJEF now lay below us. With the grandeur of the

great wadi (canyon) in the background, it was the sort of
scene of which travel posters are made. Against this
setting I took pictures of Abujaber in his keffiyeh and
Western-style suit, hoping some of the shots would come
out for The Rotarian. My camera skills were so weak I did
not even qualify as a good snap-shooter.
Just as I thought I had finished the session, a car
approached from the village, bearing the mukhtar (mayor
or headman) and his brother. Another round of picture-
taking ensued.
Hwmid Eid, the mukhtar, was a slender and
unassuming man with a small mustache. He dressed in
dark robes and a white keffiyeh, and carried a cane. To my
dismay, I discovered once we got into the village that he
looked exactly like several other men.
Lacking any great memory for faces to begin with, I
finally committed the gaffe of addressing another man as
the mukhtar. It was bound to happen sooner or later.
In fact, the mukhtar’s brother, General (Ret.) Mutlaq
Eid, looked like the real leader of the community—and
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was, I felt sure. The general was a tall, portly man who
wore white Middle Eastern clothing and a white keffiyeh,
and who projected authority and concern. He lived some
of the time in Amman but it was obvious that his heart and
devotion were here in Ar-Rajef.
The general became my guide around the village,
showing me first the old Roman water system and cistern.
This ancient construction had supplied all of Ar-Rajef’s
water for many centuries. However, all of its output would
go for irrigation now that water had begun arriving
through the pipes of the Jordanian government’s water
system. That long-awaited milestone had occurred just
the week prior to my visit.
He went on to show me the whitewashed stone and
wattle buildings, including the mosque. These buildings
were piled more or less atop each other, and had a spare,
ascetic beauty. General Eid explained that he wanted to
keep the original buildings for both historical and storage
purposes.
The families he wished to move onto separate one-acre
plots, where they could each have their own trees. He said
a thousand trees were planted in Ar-Rajef every year. It
was obvious, though, that a lot of trees remained to be
planted, over a lot of years.
The general liked to promote the contributions of his
brother the mukhtar. I did not argue with this brotherly
generosity, even though it was obvious that Mukhtar
Hwmid Eid was a shy man, lacking force or dynamism. I

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merely listened with respect as the general recounted how

he and the mukhtar had succeeded in getting a
government doctor for the village clinic two days a week
instead of one.
The brothers had partly overcome, too, the villagers’
traditional reluctance to send girls to school. All they had
done, according to General Eid, was to point out to the
parents that the boys would get an education and leave
the village, while the uneducated girls would be left
without husbands.
This was enough of a hint to result in a substantial
enrollment increase in the local girls’ school.
Yes, I thought, with such on-site leadership, the
Amman Rotary’s projected community center should do
very well here.
At the end of the tour the general took me to meet his
wife, an attractive woman in her late 40s or early 50s.
They then presented me with two Roman clay lamps the
general’s men had dug up in his own fields.
“Because you have come from America to sow peace
between our peoples,” said the general, who knew I was
going on to Israel. It was a hard assignment to lay on one
traveler.
“Abujaber did not do well,” he added. “We should have
had a party for you under canvas. We don’t get many
visitors.”
I stammered that I was sure Abujaber was bearing in
mind that it was Ramadan, and that even after nightfall

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such a party might somehow have seemed inappropriate.

To myself I admitted that it would have been fun to be
greeted like Lawrence of Arabia, or Gertrude Bell, or Freya
Stark. At the same time, I’d have been very uncomfortable
about it. I knew as well as anyone the difference between
the heroic traveler and the bumbling tourist.
As to the general’s kindly expressed idea that I had
come to “sow peace,” it interested me that a soldier spoke
more peaceably than anyone else I had talked with in
Jordan—for even Abujaber spoke of the “terrible injustice”
perpetrated by Israel. I believed General Eid was sincere,
although I was sure that during his military career he had
been a determined fighter. The difference, I thought, lay in
what he was doing now. As a farmer, a builder, a developer
with the well-being of his village at heart, he was bound to
have a different and less militant perspective.

37
 To the Rose-Red City

FOLLOWING my tour of the village I rode out of Ar-Rajef

with Abujaber and his sons. In a little while we were
stopped along the mountain road, gazing down on the
impossible cleft in the cliffs (the sikh, it is called) that hid
ancient Petra. Meanwhile we ate sandwiches and drank
some of my host’s good Jordanian beer.
We could not have had even a light lunch back in the
village; the fast forbade the Moslem villagers to eat during
the daylight hours, and Islamic teaching also banned
alcoholic beverages at any time. Abujaber was a
Christian, which was what made it possible for him to be
a brewer in a Moslem country. The taste of his excellent
product was especially appreciated here in the middle of
the desert.
When we were finished we drove down to the Petra
visitors’ center. I could feel my excitement growing; I was
about to see the famous

rose-red city half as old as time.

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(This great and famous line was written by a 19th

century Oxford University luminary, Dean John William
Burgin. His poem, called simply “Petra,” won him the
1859 Newdigate Prize for Poetry, given by the university.
His curious fate is that the line about the “rose-red city”
is known by practically every reader of English—but very
few could name its author. Perhaps this is just, in view of
the Dean’s arrogant and overbearing attitude toward
Oxford’s women students. One of these, Gertrude Bell,
was to become a noted Arabist and traveler, and among
the most famous of Petra’s many visitors. And, of course,
far more famous than her Oxford denigrator.)
It was past mid-afternoon when we arrived at the
visitors’ center, and it turned out it was too late to walk
in—we would have to take the horses. For some reason
Abujaber seemed perturbed by this news; but I was
happy.
I love horses, even though they are not a particularly
comfortable mode of transportation if you don’t know how
to ride them—and I don’t. But by coincidence, I had been
assigned a white horse to ride upon. I had always wanted
to ride a white horse, symbolic of high heroism. Until now,
I never had—but today I could pretend to be just a little
heroic.
It turned out that my composure at the idea of travel by
horseback was what was perturbing Abujaber. “You were
in terror during the whole drive down here,” he said. “Now
you are faced with the need to ride a horse, and it doesn’t
seem to bother you. I don’t understand.”
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I could have told him. A horse is a reasonably sane and

self-preserving animal—much more so than a human
being with access to an internal combustion engine on
wheels.
With guides leading my animal, we soon were threading
our way into the ancient city. Tall rose-tawny cliffs loomed
close on each side. In places they almost seemed to meet
overhead, reducing the sky to a narrow, meandering
ribbon of blue. I had a swift mental vision of a massive
earthquake snapping the defile shut as if it were a giant
coin purse. With some difficulty, I suppressed the vision.
If it happened it would all be over in an instant, so why
make a fuss?
Occasional bas relief sculptures on the walls of the
sikh, like road markers, told us we were getting close to
the epiphany of something great. I felt like shouting
Burgin’s poem aloud:

“It seems no work of man’s creative hand, hand, hand…”

But I reminded myself that my companions already

thought I was crazy. Why encourage them in that view?
What was Petra, anyway? Scholarly lives have been
spent trying to answer that question. The city appears to
have belonged to a mysterious ancient people, the
Nabataeans. They were traders who became fabulously
rich by controlling the roads that ran through this region.
Eventually they fell under the sway of the ubiquitous
Romans, who for a time made themselves masters of this
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dry fringe of the known world. But the Romans too passed.
Eternity was beyond even their grasp.
In any case, the city seems to have gone on well enough
for a time under Roman rule. Nobody quite knows what
finished Petra, but it may have been an earthquake of the
very sort I had been envisioning as we traveled through
the sikh.
We must have ridden several miles before the passage
seemed to close up, so that we appeared to be approaching
a solid rock wall. But we rode right at it, and then around
it—and there was the famous Treasury.
We stopped in the enclosure before it. The others in the
party dismounted, while I more or less skidded from my
horse. (I also always needed a block to mount, but that
didn’t bother me much even though it wasn’t especially
heroic. At least when it came to mounting and remounting
there was never a shortage of rocks of a suitable size. Not
here in the rose-red city.)
The Treasury is to Petra what the Coliseum is to Rome—
its unquestioned trademark. The difference in the case of
Rome is that one might think of other things as well—St.
Peter’s Basilica, for example. But, because ordinary life
stopped here so many centuries ago, the Treasury is all
the wider world knows of Petra. This was true even before
it was visited by the noted but fictitious Indiana Jones.
Everyone knows what the structure looks like—the
giant columns topped by a classical-style pediment
cupped around a huge urn, all built into an imposing cliff.

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I think the consensus is that it probably was a tomb—but

for centuries the legend had it that the urn atop it was
filled with coins and jewels.
That no doubt is why it came to be called The Treasury.
The urn is pockmarked by shots fired by men seeking to
unleash a flow of wealth that never was there.
Large as it is, the Treasury’s only apparent indoor space
is a small rectangular room behind the pillars. If this
immense building was indeed a tomb, then this room
most likely was the tomb chamber. But evidence of this
has long since vanished—there are no sarcophagi, the
space is absolutely empty.
From this vantage point it seems, briefly, that this is all
there is to Petra—looking around, all the visitor can see
are carved rock walls. But in the cliffs beyond the
enclosure we saw lintels, façades, friezes and stairways,
and gaping holes which may once have been doors—all
evidence that human habitation had once been extensive
around here.
The natural rock formations in which the architectural
features had been cut were impressive, with their
convolutions and striations of various colors. Still, the
dominant color was red beyond doubt, even if not exactly
rose-red.
Off to one side of the Treasury enclosure vendors had
set up tables where they hawked trashy souvenirs. The
Jordanian government’s Department of Antiquities had
posted warnings against these souvenirs; but the

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warnings were unnecessary to anyone with a modicum of

common sense. Some of the vendors’ wares appeared to be
imitation antiquities—and, I am sure, were imitation. The
rest could have been purchased at a Woolworth’s—or,
these days, at a dollar store—in the United States. The
savings in travel costs would have been immense.
Abujaber had been here many times, but his sons and
I were new, and anxious to see what more there was to the
place. So we remounted and rode on, toward the Roman
amphitheatre. All the while, the surrounding cliffs seemed
to evolve from raw rock into sculpture and architecture
and back.
Despite my profound interest in the surroundings I had
had time to notice the deplorable state of my saddle.
Perhaps it had simply been manufactured to be
uncomfortable, or perhaps it was old—going back, say, to
the time of Lawrence of Arabia. Not that Lawrence’s career
was so old in the context of this ancient place.
Anyway, when we arrived at the colonnade near the
amphitheatre I found another large stone block and
managed to dismount. I was grateful for the respite.
Abujaber rode up beside me and halted.
“There’s more,” he said. “There’s the monastery. But it’s
an hour’s climb going up there”—he pointed to a narrow
defile up ahead to the right—“and about an hour coming
back. And we would have to go on foot.”
The monastery was not a monastery as we think of it. It
seems to have been a place of sacrifice for ancient Petra, a

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so-called “high place” where its priests encountered its

gods. As is the case with much else about the city, no one
seems absolutely sure of this.
It would have been interesting to see; but I reluctantly
agreed that we didn’t have time for that. Instead we went
to the nearby lodge. There we had trouble getting even
water, because of Ramadan. But we did get a little to
drink.
I now had time to ask Abujaber about an American flag
I had noticed while riding through the sikh; it had waved
cheerfully from a nearby cliff. He explained that
archeological digs continued in Petra, and what I had seen
was the camp of the University of Utah archeological
team.
The ride out seemed longer than the ride in. This was
because with each passing moment the saddle became
older and further past its prime, and so did I. But there is
such a thing as letting down the side: so I said nothing
about it.
As for Petra, I consider it a miracle of the highest order
that I got to see this majestic, beautiful place. Recently I
read that hotels have been opened, and some five
thousand people a day now disturb the stillness there. I
am glad I am not there to see it now. An onslaught of that
size on a place that has brooded in silence for centuries
seems a violation of something sacred.
I found the car ride back to Amman less harrowing than
the ride down, perhaps because I was now in the back seat
rather than in the front.
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Earlier that day, Abujaber had said to me, “I ask myself

where you get the self-discipline to step into anything that
moves.”
“I have often asked myself the same question,” I had
replied with truth.
It had been an exciting day, almost too exciting. I would
not have missed it for the world. But I was glad when the
car pulled up in front of the hotel.

45
 Crossing the Jordan

ON AUGUST 7, 1978, I crossed the famous Allenby

Bridge over the Jordan River into the Israeli-occupied
West Bank. I did this not with grace. Not with finesse. But
at least with success—success which I believe owed much
more to Abujaber and the Amman Rotarians than to any
effort of mine.
Named for British Field Marshal Sir Edmund (later
Viscount) Allenby, Britain’s best World War I commander
in the Middle East, the bridge was built to facilitate that
general’s successful advance to Jerusalem and beyond. I
believe it was later renamed after Jordan’s late, knightly
King Hussein; but, if it is the same bridge, as I think, the
name change occurred after my crossing.
Abujaber came with his driver to the Grand Palace
Hotel on the morning of the 7th. There he saw to it that I
got on a service taxi bound for the bridge, for which he had
generously paid the fare, and we exchanged last-minute
talk about the article I was planning to do on the Amman
Rotary Club.
More than anything I had written to that point in my
life, I hoped to succeed in getting this article published.
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The editor of The Rotarian had told me that the man who
had previously undertaken to write about the club had not
had his piece accepted. So I clearly had to meet higher
standards than this unfortunate writer had achieved.
Considering what an unusual experience hosting me
must have been for Abujaber and his colleagues, I felt the
least I owed them was some good publicity, which the
article would provide. The piece was in fact published the
following year, and it seems that it was generally liked by
the Amman Rotarians.
The last thing Abujaber explained before our parting
was the rate of exchange. At this time the Israeli currency
was still called the lira.
“It’s 32 lirot to the dinar,” he said. “Don’t let them cheat
you.”
“They won’t cheat me,” I promised. And we were off: five
Arab travelers, the Arab driver, and I—just where I would
prefer not to be, in the front seat.
(Nearly a quarter of a century later, as I prepared this
work for publication, I received updated tidings of Mr.
Abujaber. He was in his 80s by that time, but still active
in his businesses and in the affairs of the Orthodox
Church and the Amman YMCA. In addition, I learned that
“Sa’ad” was now being transliterated “Ziad.” Perhaps this
is a small expression of what seems to be a Millennial-era
desire to change the name, or at least the spelling, of
everything. I do not intend to fall prey to this trend. To me,
“Ziad” will always be “Sa’ad,” just as on my maps of the

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world “Ceylon,” “Bombay,” Peking,” and “China” will hold

pride of place—even if these cherished old names have
faded from the memories of the rest of the human race.
For that matter, too, “Muslims” will continue to be
“Moslems”; and I will continue to be Pennsylvania Dutch
rather than Pennsylvania German.)
It appeared from the information on the internet that
Mr. Abujaber’s attitudes toward Israel had, if anything,
hardened over the years. But then, the attitudes of
virtually everyone on all sides of the situation seemed to
have hardened. This is tragic; but there is no reason to
expect any one person to be exempt from general societal
pressures.
As to the wrongs and injustices with which Israel has
been charged—these, alas, are true; but they are true only
because that is the way the pendulum of history swings.
An injustice to any one group can, it seems, only be
redressed by an injustice to some other group.
If the peasants of Europe suffer from religious
persecution and flee to America seeking redress, for
example, the consequence must be that American Indians
will lose their lands. At least, that was the way it
happened. And so it has always gone.
Jews have been persecuted beyond measure by
Christians, pagans, and Moslems. (I am here
characterizing the Nazis of the 20th century as pagans.) It
seems only just that the Jews be compensated in some
small measure by a state of their own, in a corner of the

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world where they have millennia-old ties to the land. Yet

this entails inevitable injustice to others whose families
also have lived in that place, for many centuries if not for
millennia.
I do not know the answer to this problem. But the
future of the world may depend upon a workable answer.
I remain grateful to Mr. Abujaber and his friends for
guiding me through an adventure I certainly would not
have been up for on my own. I have not seen any of them
since the day I set out on the final stages of my trip to
Jerusalem; but I think of them often.
As the sherut pulled away from my host that long-ago
day, we were headed toward one of the deepest inhabited
areas on earth, lying well below sea level. The Jordan
Valley is the extension of the Great Rift that begins in East
Africa and travels north through the Red Sea and the
Dead Sea and the historic Jordan River.
I had wondered whether, when we started our descent
into the valley, I would have an impression of its
immensity and depth, and I certainly did. It stretched far,
far below, so far that I felt as if I were observing the scene
from a plane. I remembered hearing that King Hussein, an
expert pilot, had flown up and down the valley, all the
while remaining below sea level.
In some areas, where aforestation seemed to have made
headway, the land below looked rich and green and fertile.
In other places it was bone white. I thought it the most
magnificent scene I had ever set eyes on, even beyond the
Wadi Aravah and the Sikh.
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The driver proceeded in the usual way for Middle

Eastern drivers. That is to say, his guiding principle
appeared to be that hills are made for passing, and the
challenge is all the greater if a visibility-blocking curve is
thrown into the equation for good measure. Although I
was concentrating on the scenery his technique made me
nervous.
Sometime during the trip I was inspired to give him a
propitiatory gift—my cigarette lighter. This had an
unfortunate effect on his concentration. It caused him to
fumble in the glove compartment until he produced a
pack of Gold Star cigarettes as a return gift.
We sped along a stretch of road marked with a sign
proclaiming “Sea Level,” then dipped below that into the
broad, flat plain of the valley bottom. The bottom of the
world, I thought; at least of the human world.
Soon we were at the reception center, a corrugated,
metal-roofed structure with open sides. Dozens, perhaps
hundreds of people jostled or stood around, all of us more
or less captive in a limited space.
From nearby an officer—I caught sight of him and he
looked like at least a colonel—roared at us all over a P.A.
system. His tone was scathing, but few people paid any
attention except for the individuals he had singled out for
his diatribe.
I asked a young soldier or policeman what to do. He led
me to the colonel, who stopped roaring long enough to
direct me to an office on the side. It was marked
“Foreigners.”
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At that window I received a pink, stamped paper. I then

joined the line for the green and yellow antique-looking
busses which pulled up every few minutes. Each in its
turn was packed with passengers and had its roof piled
high with luggage before it pulled away.
“Line” is, in fact, not the word for what I had joined. It
was a pushing, shoving, undisciplined crowd. Pungent-
smelling, too; but that was understandable, considering
the perspiration everyone was generating. The temperature
hovered at around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Flies buzzed
and alighted on my face and arms, and I could not move
to shoo them off. To say the least, it was not a pleasant
situation.
I learned at once that one did not have a place if
someone else could shove in front of one. People tried. A
man who spoke a little English instructed me to shove
back, and I did. At one point I myself was shoved back,
right onto a woman’s feet. She took her revenge by ranting
at me in Arabic, no doubt throwing in every curse she
knew.
I tried to remain unperturbed. No one ever tells you that
it is sometimes good NOT to know another language—but
linguistic ignorance sometimes IS good, and this was one
of those occasions. My Arabic was effectively limited to two
words: “shuchran” (thank you) and “salaam” (hello,
goodbye, peace). I didn’t catch either of these words in the
woman’s tirade.
All I could do was give her a simple-minded, apologetic
smile. That, and reflect that, had I known what she was
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saying, I would almost certainly have had to take

exception to it.
When I pushed my way onto a bus at last, an officer
discovered that I had lost my stamped pink slip. I had to
get off and go back to the Foreigners’ window near the
shouting colonel. But I was on the next bus, standing and
clinging to a seat back for support as we rolled out toward
the River Jordan.
We traveled for another ten minutes, with a stop at one
more Jordanian post. There we standees got off to make it
easy for an officer to make a last-minute check of
everybody’s documents. Once more we clambered aboard,
and the bus vibrated across the short, corrugated roadbed
of the renowned Allenby Bridge. From the sound of the
bus’s tires, the bridge would have passed—maybe—for a
creek bridge in the United States. But I never actually saw
the bridge, although getting to it had preoccupied me for
so long. Its memory remains a rumble underfoot, and no
more.
The next time we got off the bus it was to rest for a few
minutes in the shade of another corrugated metal roof, a
small one. And over this one the Magen David, the flag of
Israel, hung limply in the breathless, overheated
atmosphere.
For the very first time, I had crossed the Jordan.

52
 On to Jerusalem

TREES grow along much of the course of the Jordan.

Away from the river bank, though, the Allenby Bridge area
is a desolate, chalk-white desert. At the time I was there it
bristled with defense installations. This was a line dividing
two nations technically at war. In a gesture toward more
normal relations the Israelis allowed thousands of people
to cross and re-cross the bridge every day.
There was no doubt that this provided large economic
benefits to Israel, which needed the Arab workers—but
then, the workers also needed their jobs; and it did not
follow that they would necessarily be welcomed back into
the territory of a country their own nation had tried to
destroy. Failing to achieve this goal, Jordan had lost the
West Bank; and there was no absolute necessity for Israel
to let bygones be bygones and welcome Jordanian
workers.
At the time I passed through the area the Israeli gesture
of openness had met with little apparent success. Later,
though, there would be a formal peace between Israel and
Jordan—tenuous, subject to the powerful winds of larger

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Middle Eastern politics, but real. For a while the situation

looked more hopeful—but only, alas, for a little while.
There had been three other Americans on the bus by
which I had come: a man, his wife, and their small
daughter, traveling in from Egypt. Judging from the
startled reaction of the Israeli officer who now came
aboard, four Americans on one bus came as a surprise.
The other three came as a surprise to me, too. While I had
waited on the Jordanian side I had seen no other
American travelers, and the bus itself had been so
crowded I had not been aware they were on it. It appeared
that only chance had led to our riding together.
“I’ve heard they make them wait for hours on the Israeli
side,” said my countrywoman to me. I looked at her, trying
to gauge just how long she and her family had been in
Egypt. Long enough, it seemed, for them to have picked up
the prevalent Arab attitudes. I said I doubted that people
were made to wait deliberately but it must take a lot of
time to check the mounds of luggage.
For me, anyway, the procedure involved in getting away
from the checkpoint was quick but complicated. We were
bussed to another terminal, where the bus disgorged its
passengers and its luggage was unloaded. Since I was
hand-carrying all my luggage I was sent back to the
customs area by special taxi.
At customs my luggage and I were quickly checked. I
had to prove that my cameras would not explode, and I
changed Jordanian dinars for Israeli lirot. After I was

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returned to the larger terminal I was bundled into a

service taxi—called a sherut on this side of the Jordan—
with four young Arab men.
At last I was on the final leg of my trip to Jerusalem.
On the way our passports were checked twice, once by
a bearded old Israeli reservist (or so I surmised he was)
who wore a yarmulka. We stopped at Jericho for a soft
drink, although one of the young men was a strictly
observant Moslem and would drink nothing because of
the Ramadan fast.
It was still morning, and already he looked sick from the
heat. I admired his determination. Fasting all day in the
incredible August heat of this place would have “done in”
Westerners of a far stronger constitution than mine, I
thought.
Before our Jericho stop I had glimpsed the Dead Sea off
to our left. We were still below sea level, but not for long.
The sherut was powerful—I think it may have been an old
Checker cab—and drove steadily and urgently up the
steep road.
The mountains through which we rode were brown and
desolate, and each hillock appeared to be crowned with its
own small ruin. Most of these, I thought, were probably
not important enough for the attention of archeologists-—
but I wished we could have stopped and explored one or
two.
Behind one of the mountains we were approaching lay
Jerusalem the Golden, the miscalled City of Peace. And

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suddenly there it was above us. In the afternoon sun it

was golden indeed, as its stones caught and radiated the
light. Above the wall the Dome of the Rock, the Moslem
shrine, picked up and amplified the sunlit tones in a
bright, metallic way.
Saul Bellow was wrong, I thought, to talk of the city’s
gray stones—how could he imagine the possibility of gray
in this bright gold cityscape? I was to return here a year
and a half later, in the depths of a rain-soaked winter.
Only then did I discover that the writer knew what he was
talking about when it came to the city’s winter coloration.
Meanwhile, in the present moment, something else
golden—gold and white—caught my eye. I realized it was
the papal flag, which I had never before seen flying
anywhere. It was an interesting sight, and I wondered idly
why it was fluttering at half-mast. After I had arrived at my
destination, later in the afternoon, I learned that Pope
Paul VI, Giovanni Montini, had died. This was just a few
years after he himself had walked the streets of
Jerusalem. In Jordan, where the only radio news available
to me had been in Arabic, I had missed learning of his
death.
We drove past the city wall to a hotel or bus terminal—
near the Damascus Gate, I think it was. Along the way the
young Arabs got off one by one, while I simply marveled at
the “stage setting.” At the hotel (or terminal) I switched to
a special taxi driven by a young Sephardic Jew named
Itzhak, and within a few minutes I had arrived at my

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destination—St. Andrew’s Hospice, or the Scottish

Hospice as it is familiarly called. It is situated across from
the Old City, on the other side of the Biblical Hinnom
Valley—traditionally the site of Hell, but at this time
rather nicely fixed up, thank you.
The hospice is a forbidding stone building attached to a
fortress-like church; but one drives up an imposing
curved driveway and finds a pleasant tiled entranceway.
The entranceway features plants in urns set in niches,
and there are comfortable seats on either side of the door.
I warmed to the place from the start, partly because of
its inviting entranceway. Overall, staying there was like
staying in an austere but hospitable manor house, owned
by friends.
The church had been dedicated by none other than
Field Marshal Lord Allenby, he of the eponymous bridge.
His portrait hung in the large hospice drawing room, and
I was to see it many times in the next few days.
(NOTE: A report from National Public Radio—late
summer of 2002—suggests that I might be considerably
less enchanted by the Old City of Jerusalem were I to
catch my first sight of it today. According to NPR the place
is jam-packed with humanity—22,000, I believe the
report said, in a space that I know can only realistically
hold a few thousand.
Furthermore, the humanity it is packed with is made
up of warring groups. They have built ramshackle
structures, many of them wooden, closing off courtyards

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and depriving each other of light. In general, one of the

most significant historical and religious sites in the world
appears to have been turned into a shantytown and a
potential tinderbox, ready to go the way of Afghanistan’s
great Buddhas—and, as in the case of the Buddhas, the
threat to the survival of this place is religion. Or rather,
religious fanaticism.
The yearning toward something higher—the Lord, or
God, or Allah, or whatever—seems to be hard-wired into
the human race. It can and, I think, should, be ennobling.
Unfortunately, it appears that millions of people are
insecure if their version of this yearning—their religion—
is not accepted as the one true faith. The answer of many
to this dilemma is to kill and destroy until everyone left
alive around them shares their views.
Under these circumstances it probably would be better
to do away with religion, since its consequences have often
been so bloody and tragic. But that is not an option open
to us, despite the opinions of Professor Dawkins and his
ilk. And so the fate of Jerusalem, and indeed of the whole
world, is suspended beneath a sword, a sword on whose
blade is engraved the word FAITH.)
I refuse to believe our situation is hopeless. But to get
out of it is likely to require moral and intellectual growth,
at a very demanding pace.
On the long-ago day of my first arrival in Jerusalem I
went out to buy some soap and other necessities. Both
times I passed the park built by Sir Moses Montefiore in

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the 19th century, with its famous windmill. In the park

children and adults played, walked, and talked as they
might anywhere.
I thought of the word-pictures of Israeli depravity
painted by many, especially by New Leftist writers. If what
I saw before me here was an example of depravity, it wore
a strange face. To me it looked exactly like normality.
The second time I returned to the hospice that day, I
met Sue Duncan in the foyer. She was a young University
of Edinburgh medical student who had seized a chance to
work here as a way of spending the summer in Jerusalem.
She said Miss Irene King, the hospice warden, had
returned while I was out and had expressed surprise
when she learned of my arrival.
“She said she had never known anyone to cross the
Allenby Bridge on schedule before,” the young woman
explained.
It really had helped to have friends in high places on the
other side of the Jordan.
Soon after this exchange with Sue Duncan I got to meet
Miss King. She was a fine-looking woman in perhaps her
mid-to late-50s, a “silver fox” type, with the finely-coifed
gray-white hair that the term implies. To me she seemed
the no-nonsense Scottish governess. I was convinced she
needed all the attributes of a good governess to run a place
like this, which might have guests from any part of the
world and from any point on the political and religious
spectrum.

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“You must feel very sure of yourself, to have come so far

alone,” she said to me.
“I’m scared to death,” was my frank rejoinder.
“Naturally,” Miss King replied cheerfully. “If you’re not
afraid of anything, what is there to be brave about?”
What, indeed?
At dinner in the hospice’s small dining room I met Dr.
Randall and his wife, missioners who had been stationed
in Rhodesia. That was what he called it, but I believe it had
long since become Zimbabwe. Which, as name changes
go, disturbed me less than some—I always regarded Cecil
Rhodes as something of a questionable character.
The fact that the Randalls were staying here suggested
that they were Church of Scotland, but I did not ask. The
Dominie annoyed me on first sight, and I was glad to
discover he and his wife intended to leave the following
morning for Venice.
Dr. Randall had been in Jerusalem for a few weeks and
had become an expert in his own eyes. He spoke of the
Israelis as “a persecuted people turned persecutors,” and
mentioned an Arab refugee camp near Jericho. There, he
said, the Israelis had closed the camp and driven 110,000
refugees into Jordan.
“Shot some of the poor devils, too,” he added.
That had to be the Arab story on that particular
episode, I thought. I didn’t know the Israeli side of it. Was
it possible? Indeed it was, of course. I had not heard of this
incident, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. The

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Israelis were in—and remain in—a uniquely unpleasant

position. Outnumbered in the Middle East by many tens
of millions of Arabs—not to mention by other, non-Arab,
groups like the Iranians, who do not wish the Jewish state
well—they are constantly carped at by “civilized” Western
nations for not playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules
when it comes to trying to guarantee their survival as a
people.
Given their history, it is not hard to understand why
they take a hard line. It seems they would wait forever if
they waited for the outside world (which did nothing to
avert Hitler’s Holocaust) to assert that as a matter of
principle—principles like justice, to be precise—Israel has
a right to exist.
Unfortunately, as the years since the writing of this
memoir have passed, the Israelis have had to take ever-
stronger measures of self-defense. The inevitable result is
that they have gathered more and more opprobrium from
the world’s high-minded. It is impossible to look down this
ever-darkening road without a shudder.
Speaking of “oppressors,” I cannot help wondering how
the Black Africans to whom he had ministered saw Dr.
Randall. A friend, a helper, or a destroyer of their culture
and way of life? In short, an oppressor? I thought he
seemed singularly lacking in perspective on such
questions—or, more likely, they had never entered his
mind.

61
 Wanderings in the Old City

THE NEXT MORNING, after a quick breakfast of bread,

marmalade, and coffee in the hospice dining room, I went
out to play the tourist. My own room overlooked the
British Consulate, and a couple of reminders of a much
older Empire than Britain’s—Roman columns. The other
side of the building looked straight across at the imposing
Ottoman Turkish walls of the Old City.
As I walked down the driveway I gazed at the scene with
pleasure and disbelief. I was walking toward the Jaffa
Gate, where I would enter the ancient, much-lived-in (and
much-died-in) heart of Jerusalem. With an effort I walked
slowly, conserving my strength for explorations within the
walls. The road lay down into the Valley of Hinnom and up
the other side, past Mount Zion.
As I passed within the gate the clamor and swirl of
humanity took my breath away. Rows of shops sold
everything from postcards and film to embroidered
caftans to soft drinks. People of every conceivable race and
color formed and re-formed into a series of kaleidoscopic
images.

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I dodged into the entrance to the Jerusalem Citadel.

The Citadel stood just to the right on one’s way in through
the Jaffa Gate, and may thus have been the hardest to
miss of all the Old City landmarks. It is usually called the
Tower of David, but in fact it has nothing to do with the
Biblical King David and only dates back to the Ottoman
Empire—like the current city walls of which it is a part.
By whatever name, the old fortification seemed like an
excellent place to start my tour; so I approached the
entrance.
“You want to go up, down, and all around?” asked the
little man at the cash box.
I stared at him, nearly overcome by the desire to say
something flippant. What, after all, did he imagine I had
come for? But there was no need to create an international
incident. So I settled for “Yes,” and paid the small
admission price.
Inside, quiet and stillness reigned. The street noises
were shut out by the shielding stone walls. When I entered
I was almost alone in the place; while I was inside,
climbing onto parapets and studying the fortifications,
not more than half a dozen people came to join me.
Once this place had resounded to shouts, to the clang
of armor, to the neighing of horses. Now it dreamed quietly
in the heat. So perhaps peace would come to this land,
and all its military sites would become spots for tourists to
visit and gawk at.
Then I thought of the militant talk I had heard in the few
days since landing in Amman, and I was not so sure.
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Leaving the Citadel, I turned right on Armenian

Patriarchate Road and got lost almost at once. Never
mind: I could find my way later.
I had a bad moment when I thought I’d be run down by
an advancing Egged Bus Company van. In terror I
flattened myself against the wall bordering the narrow
roadway. A couple, German I thought, seemed mildly
amused by my desperate action.
“Sie fahren so schnell,” I explained weakly once the van
had gone by.
“Are you Dutch?” asked the man.
For many years I had dreamed of my first trip abroad—
what a sophisticated, cool, polyglot traveler I would be!
Now here at last was that trip; and it was nothing like my
expectations. All I could do was live the trip I was taking,
unilingual and unsophisticated as I was.
I wandered down streets about a dozen feet wide, on
which, mercifully, cars and vans could not travel. Stone
walls perhaps 15 to 20 feet high fronted on these streets,
with very few doorways or gates in them.
Retracing my steps on one such street, I found a donkey
standing across it, broadside. It looked as if I might stay
where I was for a very long time, because as far as I was
concerned the donkey had the right of way. My
imagination told me what it would feel like to be kicked by
the animal (I had, after all, grown up on a farm, so my
imaginings were based on actual memory), and cowardice
did the rest.

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By good luck I did not have to wait long for help. As

another woman approached, some men materialized and
turned the donkey parallel to the wall so we could both get
through.
I still had no clear idea where I was. But after some
more-or-less aimless wanderings I soon came out again
on Armenian Patriarchate Road and followed it past the
Armenian Monastery to the Zion Gate, near the Greek
Orthodox Abbey of the Dormition. There I left the Old City.
For a while I sat on a wall outside, overlooking the
Valley of Hinnom. Half-turning, I noticed a sign on the
gateway of a grim box of a building. “Institute of Holy Land
Studies,” it said. That was one of the places I was looking
for. Deciding to return to it the following day, I dodged
back inside the city walls.
There, another sign drew me to the traditional tomb of
King David. I followed what I thought was the direction in
which it pointed, but was not too surprised when I wound
up first at a Christian site—the Upper Room, traditional
scene of Jesus’s Last Supper. I followed a tour group up
and into the room. Centuries of pilgrim feet had worn deep
grooves into the steps leading to it.
The room itself obviously belongs to the Crusader era of
the Middle Ages, which means Jesus never set foot in it.
But this is not to debunk it—symbolic reality is no less
real, no less potent, for being symbolic.
David’s Tomb, equally unauthentic in a historical
sense, no doubt is equally powerful as a symbol for Jews.

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It lies near the Upper Room, and I found it after an

abortive attempt to ask directions in Hebrew. It was not
that I had any further illusions about my linguistic
abilities; it was simply that no one I encountered seemed
to know any English at all.
My memory of the tomb is of a dark, enclosed space
with many candles. Anything one might wish to see in this
part of the world seems to be either in a dark, enclosed
space or in a high, exposed one; and I don’t know which I
like less. I bought and lighted a candle here, in memory of
David. Wherever he might actually rest, he seemed
entitled to remembrance.
My efforts to find the Western Wall of the Jews, and the
adjacent al-Aksah Mosque and Dome of the Rock, proved
futile on this first day of exploration. I was too tired. I went
back to the post office near the Jaffa Gate, wanting to mail
some post cards, but found myself too impatient even to
stand in line for stamps.
The Anglican Church’s Christ Church Hospice was
close to the post office. I remembered Sue Duncan saying
I could get sheruts from there to most important tourist
attractions, so I went over to arrange to go to Masada.
This was the site of the Jewish Zealots’ purported heroic
last stand against the Romans in 74 C.E. The standard
account of that event, written by the brilliant apostate
Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, has been called into
question within the last decade or so, but I do not know on
what grounds. All I do know is that it is a story so noble,

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if bloody, that it ought to have happened just as Josephus

said it did.
Learning that the hospice sheruts for Masada were
booked until the following week, I made no definite
arrangements. Instead, I went back to my room.
Like other people who live in tropical and subtropical
climates the Israelis have an excellent custom of taking an
afternoon nap whenever they can; and I decided to follow
that custom. I was already beginning to notice that I
would probably not get as much done on this trip as I had
hoped.
The heat in Jerusalem was not especially debilitating,
and there was almost always a breeze—but that made the
possibility of dehydration all the greater. And I was not in
condition for the amount of activity I had suddenly
undertaken.
As I drifted off to sleep back at St. Andrew’s, I reminded
myself that I would like to find a book store. I was looking
for a book on somebody I had read about, a heroic woman
leader from the Holocaust era named Gisi Fleischmann.
I was not to find such a book on this trip. Indeed, after
failing to find one even at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
memorial, I concluded that such a thing did not exist, and
gave up looking for it. I myself was to write the work I had
searched for in vain—or something as close to it as I could
manage. But that came later.
On this particular day, I awoke from my nap in the late
afternoon and decided to return to the Old City. First,

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though, I went downstairs for the daily four o’clock ritual

of afternoon tea in the hospice drawing room. I can still
smell the rich aroma of the strong tea. The tea was
accompanied by plates of arrowroot biscuits, which
appear to be a great favorite in the region. I was to have
them again, more than once and in more than one place,
before the end of my stay in Israel.
After enjoying the tea I left again to mail the postcards
I had wanted to send earlier. I went back to the Old City
first, but found that post office closed. The employees were
Moslem and were now on holiday. Having heard of the
alleged disrespect of Israel’s Jews toward people of other
faiths I was amused by this information. But not
surprised. I had never believed the allegations anyway.
Since I was once again near Christ Church Hospice I
made arrangements to go to Masada the following
Monday, paying in advance for a place in the sherut and
a box lunch. The postcards I mailed at the Kings Hotel on
King George V street, some distance from the Old City.

68
 Encounters

ON MY WAY back to the hospice this time I met Michael

Paretz, a good-looking young Sephardic Jew who was a
master’s candidate in mathematics at the Hebrew
University and a veteran of the 1967 and 1973 wars.
Michael wanted to know how Israel was seen in the United
States, and also what I had learned of Arab views during
my short stay in Jordan.
I told him I had watched Israel’s image in the United
States deteriorate badly; I was sure that was due to Arab
petrodollars. As to the Arabs themselves, I said having
been in Jordan a few days did not make me an expert, but
that no Arab I had met had talked about destroying
Israel—not even my hardline acquaintance from the
Amman Rotary Club party.
“I realize it’s tricky,” I said, “but if you can find a way to
give back part of the land they lost, with safety, I would do
it. All except this—” and I gestured toward the Old City.
“Whatever value Jerusalem has was given it, directly or
indirectly, by Jewish history, and if I were a Jew I would
not give up even one inch of it.”

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“What about security?” Michael asked. “I was in the

army twice, and it is no fun seeing your friends killed.
When I get married and have sons I don’t want them to be
killed.”
“I know. And ordinarily I’d say America should be your
security. But after Vietnam people are reluctant to take on
commitments that might get us into wars.”
I wished I had some answers, but it seemed to me that
the questions kept changing. In fact, this change seemed
the only constant in the situation.
I kept searching for some sign that the people I saw
every day might be under stress. From the reports of
terrorist attacks that we heard on the news in the United
States, it was easy to conclude that tension must be their
daily companion. Later I concluded that it no doubt was,
but that on the whole Israel was safer than many places at
home in the United States—and that, anyway, a strain
spread out over many days and years would tend
eventually to blend into the background.
I could not anticipate the constant ratcheting up of
stress and danger that has characterized more recent
times, and not only in Israel but at home in the United
States.
But back then life went on, and in luxuriant variety. The
boy vendors at the Jaffa Gate, peddling reed flutes, Arab-
style drums, and other such low-priority items, seemed to
personify it.
“Four pound! Four pound!” they would shout, gathering

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around me and the other tourists. By “pound,” they meant

the Israeli lira.
“Be careful!” laughed a fellow American one day when
the young salesmen were particularly importunate.
“When they get down to one pound, they mean one pound
British.”
One morning I went to Supersol, the supermarket on
King George V Street. I had learned that to avoid an
Allenby Bridge-style crowd I should avoid shopping in the
late afternoon.
Only a few people were in the market that morning, and
two of them were Mr. and Mrs. Levy, an Israeli couple who
had arrived at the hospice on vacation from Netanya the
day before. They were buying some sweets for their
grandchild, who was due to arrive with their daughter on
the 9:30 train from Tel Aviv—the train line ended right
behind our hospice, and on my later trip to Israel I took the
ride for the experience of riding a train in Israel.
(Because Israel is a tiny country, its rail system likewise
is tiny. I believe that at the time of my second trip there
was a line from Haifa to Tel Aviv, in addition to the one
from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—and that I traveled on both
those lines. If this is correct, and my memory is correct
about having traveled on both lines, then I am a veteran of
travel on most or all of the Israeli system. All I can
remember for certain is my rail jaunt from Tel Aviv to
Jerusalem.
One branch of the system, closed after the 1948 Israeli
War for Independence, ran down into Egypt. It remained
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closed when it became clear that the Arab states, Egypt

included, intended to maintain permanent hostility
toward the new Jewish state. I don’t believe it was
reopened even after the Camp David Accords established
a cold peace—at best—between Israel and Egypt.
But as this is updated, traffic on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem
line has been chugging on—or at least that has been true
until quite recently, and I hope it still is. Within the past
several weeks terrorist bombs have struck trains at least
twice. Although no one has been killed or seriously
injured—as far as I know—the experience cannot have
been anything but disquieting.)
The Levys gave me a ride back to St. Andrew’s this
morning. As we drove they pointed out where a wall had run
across the city, back in the days when much of it was under
Jordanian control. That was before Jordan had made the
mistake of joining in the 1967 Arab war against Israel. Now
the wall was gone, and so were the Jordanians.
Another change, according to the Israeli couple, was
the great increase in the number of trees since that
particular war. There were individual trees, and copses of
trees, where there had been none before the war.
Our talk swung to what seemed to be the growing
misunderstanding of Israel in other countries.
“They misunderstand because they want to
misunderstand,” Mrs. Levy commented with bitterness.
Inanely, I said I would see what I could do to help.
Nothing like offering to take on the powerful force of

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antisemitism. I believed, at the time, that good things were

as possible as bad ones. I can only wish I were still that
young.

73
 The Theologian and the
Immigrant Woman

TWICE I met with Dr. G. Douglas Young, the

distinguished evangelical Christian theologian who had
founded and still directed the Institute of Holy Land
Studies. Young, a trim man in his late 60s, had been an
ambulance driver during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and
was an old Jerusalem hand. For his war service he was
named an honorary citizen of the city by the grateful
Israelis. He became controversial by his outspoken
advocacy of Israel, and I had heard it said that he could no
longer get a hearing for his views in the American press.
Just a few years after I met him, he died of a sudden
heart attack in one of the Old City’s gateways—the
Damascus Gate, I was told it was. But the Institute for
Holy Land Studies, now known as Jerusalem College,
goes on. Hopefully in the tradition he set.
As it turned out, Dr. Young and I had something of a
connection. I discovered that from a plaque on his office
wall that I spotted during our first meeting.

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It revealed him to be a Rotarian—and not only a

Rotarian, but the former president of the Amman Rotary
Club. In fact, he knew Anton Atallah, the former
Jordanian foreign minister, who he described as a very
bitter man.
I had not got that out of Mr. Atallah; but then, he and I
had not talked much. It was another Jordanian at Mr.
Abujaber’s party who had described Israel as a cancer and
an infiltrator of the PLO, and yet had denied wanting to
destroy the Jewish state.
At our first meeting Dr. Young and I discussed what we
both saw as a rising tide of antisemitism.
“You know, I come from Canada,” he said. “The thing
there is to deny that Anne Frank ever existed. (Anne Frank
was a young German Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis
for several years with her family in an attic in Amsterdam,
the Netherlands. They were captured at last, and Anne
died at the age of 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp. Her Diary of A Young Girl survived World War II and
was published, and has since stirred the conscience of
millions.)
I told Dr. Young I also had heard the story that there
was no such person as Anne Frank, and no Holocaust
either, despite the overwhelming historical evidence. Not
only some Canadians, but also some people in the United
States—and in other countries as well—continue to
believe in falsifying history for unsavory purposes of their
own.

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He replied, “I know the man who hid Anne Frank and

her family. He’s an old man now, but he still has his
buttons.”
I felt enormously moved. It wasn’t that I had ever
doubted the Diary. Still, I knew that the testimony of
someone like Dr. Young was far more important than my
personal conviction. But I also knew that even such
testimony would not convince anybody who did not want
to be convinced.
At our later meeting Dr. Young said, “The struggle here
is theological. It isn’t over land. People don’t understand
that.
“You know, in Moslem countries Jews and Christians
had a status as ‘protected people.’ Jews weren’t allowed to
ride horses, for instance. They had to pay special taxes
and wear special costumes.
“Along came these Jews and took a desolate country
where only a few hundred thousand people lived a
hundred years ago, and turned it into a garden supporting
millions. ‘Protected people’ aren’t supposed to act like
that.”
From my reading of the Picthall translation of the
Koran, the Moslem holy book, and from what little I knew
of Arab history, I saw Dr. Young’s point.
But here religion melded into nationalism. The Arab
Christians I had met had seemed no less upset by Israeli
presumption—probably in existing—than had the Arab
Moslems. If religion alone were the key, then the militancy

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of the Koran would seem to justify such hostile feelings

much better than the Christian Bible.
After all, the first blows in the epic struggle between
Islam and Christendom had been struck by the Moslems.
The Prophet Mohammed had died in the year 632 C.E. In
the century that followed, adherents of the new religion
had surged outward from their base in the Arabian
peninsula and had overrun much of the Middle East,
Central Asia, and North Africa. They had poured across
the Straits of Gibraltar into Southern Europe, where they
established themselves in most of what is now Spain and
Portugal and pushed on into the South of France.
There they were stopped at the Battle of Chalons (or
Tours) in 732 C.E. But they remained ensconced in the
European territory they had invaded until 1492. Then
they were expelled (together with the Jews) from Granada,
the last principality they had ruled. Their influence
remains heavy in Spain, Portugal, and the South of
France; and in fact is no doubt greatly increased today.
This bit of history is usually overlooked when modern-
day Moslems recall the horror of the Crusades, the
succession of Western invasions of the “Holy Land” that
began in 1095 C.E. The most commonly stated objective of
the Crusades was to recover the Christian holy places
from the Moslems who had seized them. This objective
was accomplished only partially and briefly.
However, anyone who knows the history that preceded
the Crusades—the Moslem invasion of Europe—will be

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forced to at least consider another possibility. That is that

the Crusades represented a counter-offensive launched to
protect Christendom from relentlessly advancing Islam.
So. Despite good patches, Moslems have not been
especially friendly to Jews. Or to Christians, either, for
that matter.
But then, Christians, Arab and non-Arab alike, have
not really been noted for philosemitism. Like it or not, the
Christian religion has been used to justify such
depravities as the Inquisition, and has also helped provide
the intellectual underpinnings for the Holocaust.
Between my two visits to Dr. Young I had gone to see
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and memorial. On
the Number 20 bus I met a disgruntled immigrant woman
from the Soviet Union.
Nothing about Israel pleased her. She reminisced about
the good old days in the U.S.S.R. There she and her
husband, a medical specialist, had had an apartment,
standing in society, and excellent medical care. So she
said. Now they had no apartment and had a hard time
finding suitable work.
“Believe me,” she said, “there is discrimination here.”
“There is discrimination everywhere,” I answered. “The
thing is to prevent it from being institutionalized.”
I believed I could understand some of the background
of her complaints. It was a difficult time in Israel, in
economic terms. Inflation was high. There did seem to be
a shortage of housing, although I as a foreign visitor was

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only conscious of this from occasional glimpses of the ads

in the Jerusalem Post. And the skills of a doctor must have
been a glut on the Israeli market.
I wondered what had brought the woman to Israel. It
was hard to believe she and her husband had really left a
comfortable and respected situation in the Soviet Union,
because the Soviet Union was going through one of its
recurrent persecutions of Jewish citizens. I suspected
persecution had been her and her husband’s lot there, as
well as the experience of so many others.
At some point she, her husband, or both of them had
decided that human dignity was better than possessions.
Now she, at least, appeared to have changed her mind,
perhaps because the recognition of that dignity had not
been as immediate as she would have liked. But for
myself, it would seem better to live under a government
that was at least nominally trying to fight discrimination
than under one that doled out and withdrew rights in the
Soviet fashion.
The bus stopped at the top of a long hill.
“Goodbye,” I said. “I am going to Yad Vashem.”
I put a slight emphasis on the last two words, in the
hope of leading her to reconsider her present situation.
“Yes. Yad Vashem,” she repeated. “Good-bye.”
I got off here, at Mount Herzl—named after Theodor
Herzl, the founder of the Jewish state—and walked in to
the museum as Dr. Young suggested I do.
Soon I was gazing out over a vast masonry plain. On it
eternal flames flickered under what appeared to be a flat
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masonry sky. Names were incised on the plain that was

the floor, each naming a particular locus of hell on earth.
Auschwitz. Dachau. Treblinka. On and on, the fateful toll
of names. The clang of sorrow and calamity.
More—I staggered through room after room of
documentation of the Shoah—room after room of pictures
and documents that one has seen before, at least in
books, but that never lose their horrific impact. How could
anyone claim this enormous exercise in evil had never
occurred?
For the time being I forgot about the doctor’s wife.
Sometimes I wonder whether she and her husband stayed
in Israel.
I returned to the Jaffa Gate on a bus which contained
several Arab riders. Later two soldiers got on, not armed
that I could see. Still later a third soldier, this one with a
submachine gun, got on as well. This soldier spotted the
fact—which I had not noticed—that an old Arab passenger
was holding an amorphous cloth sack. The soldier yanked
the bag open and examined it, while I cringed.
It was not a pleasant scene—but it was over in a
minute, and the old man had his bag back. “Credit” for the
episode went, I thought, to the terrorists who stalked this
land. I could not then foresee how much worse the
terrorism situation would become.
Getting off the bus by the Old City, I saw a group of
young IDF soldiers, men and women, starting happily up
Mount Zion. Later in the day I saw more soldiers. A few of

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them had submachine guns, but not an unusual number

considering Israel’s perpetually crisis-ridden state.
The populace certainly did not seem to conduct all its
affairs “under the watchful eyes of armed soldiers,” as I
had heard charged. Besides, as an American friend
pointed out, in Israel you KNOW who is armed. In the
United States it can be more difficult to tell who has a
weapon and who has not.
Returning to the hospice, I felt too exhausted to
contemplate much more activity that day. I washed some
clothing, and was about to go for a shower when Sue
Duncan, the medical-student-in-residence, knocked at
my door—I had a phone call. It turned out to be Fred
Rooney, the nephew of my Congressman, who was
working at Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim.
After some discussion it was decided that I would go
there in a few days, and perhaps work for a short period of
time as a kibbutz volunteer. After all, I wanted to write a
small article about Fred for his Moravian College alumni
magazine. What better way to do it than to share his
experiences?
I reworked my schedule, went downstairs for tea, and
tried without success to make a couple of phone calls. I
wanted to reach TWA, to confirm the date of my flight
back; and I also wanted to reach the very anti-Israeli
American Friends Service Committee. I’d have liked to
interview their staff, to discover the origins of their
attitudes.

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Eventually, although not that day, I was to reach TWA.

I never got through to the AFSC.
Going out later on my usual errand of mailing
postcards, I stopped for a light meal at the Orly Coffee
House just off King George V Street. I then retraced my
steps to King David Street and walked a few blocks,
passing the famous—or infamous, depending on your
viewpoint—King David Hotel. In the last days of Britain’s
Palestine Mandate, when the hotel was a British military
headquarters, a bomb had been set off there by Jewish
underground members.
The perpetrators had been members of Irgun, the
underground organization headed by Menachem Begin—
the same man who at the time of my visit was Prime
Minister of Israel. Some 91 people had been killed and 45
wounded; 15 Jews were among the dead.
The Jewish National Council immediately condemned
the King David attack, and rightly so. It was a very large
and dramatic action for its time; and no matter how
justified it may have seemed to those who committed it,
there always are consequences of such things. The
perpetrators of every such action justify it by the one
before; and so death begets death in endless
reverberation.
Well, at least the hotel had been a military target. An
attack on it was perhaps more justifiable than one on
farmers in the fields, busses full of school children, and
Olympic athletes. Such people were among the targets

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chosen by Palestinian terrorists—the prime examples of

such terrorists at that time being Yasser Arafat’s Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) and Dr. George Habash’s
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
I bought yet more postcards at the King David and
returned to the Scottish Hospice. After this trip, I told
myself, I would take a vacation from historical
rumination.
There always were interesting people at the Hospice
dining table. Tonight it was a young Scot named Peter
Cowe, a student at Mansfield College, Oxford. Cowe had
arrived recently, and had enrolled at once in the ulpan,
the modern Hebrew training school run by the Hebrew
University.
The ulpanim are marvelous institutions. They are
designed to teach passable modern Hebrew to immigrants
and others with a need to know, all within a period of six
weeks or so. My own Hebrew teacher in the United States,
Hadassah Nemovicher, had been an ulpan teacher. She
had not been able to use ulpan methods with her weakling
American students, of course. Nevertheless, she got some
impressive results with us, and for a time I aspired to
attend an ulpan myself. I now believe that, between my
stress disorder and my lack of talent for languages, the
experience would have shredded what sanity I still could
lay claim to.
Yet here was young Peter Cowe, at the beginning of the
ulpan course and lusting after yet more linguistic

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adventure. He intended to continue at the Hebrew

University, where, for theological reasons, I believe, he
planned to study Armenian manuscripts.
I wished him luck. Jerusalem was to me a city of
unintelligible scripts. Neither Hebrew nor Arabic had
seemed more unintelligible than the public signs I had
seen in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City. I suspect,
though, that young Cowe was a linguistic whiz, and did
very well.
While preparing this work for readers, my editor
Patricia McAndrew discovered evidence that my suspicion
about the young man was correct. As of the year 2002
there was a brilliant Armenologist named Dr. S. Peter
Cowe at UCLA. Dr. Cowe was the holder of the university’s
oldest endowed chair and widely regarded as being at the
top of an admittedly small and esoteric field. Armenian
studies, for size, does not compare favorably with, say,
19th century American literature.
I have little doubt that Dr. S. Peter Cowe is the same as
the eager young student who I once met at dinner in the
Scottish Hospice in Jerusalem. Any other possibility
would be too much of a coincidence.
The day after this dinner I was scheduled to interview
Moshe Kohn, senior correspondent for the Jerusalem Post.
I followed the instructions I had been given and took a
Number 20 bus from the Jaffa Gate to the Central Bus
Station. From there, I had been told, it would be an easy
walk to the Post.

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My seatmate on the bus was a young man from

California who had recently made aliyah—that is,
emigrated to Israel. In the course of conversation with him
I asked, “The Arabs say Begin wants Jordan. Does he?”
“Yes, he does,” the young man replied. “It’s part of our
Biblical heritage. We’re not going to take it, of course; but
if they start trouble again—and they will—I think we
should move in and flatten all their capitals. Otherwise
they’ll get us next time around.”
For what Israel had been through, I considered this a
valid if disconcerting position. After all, Israel’s most
recent war had not been the radiantly victorious Six-Day
War of 1967, but the barely-survived Yom Kippur War of
1973. I got off at the Central Bus Station, near the Hilton
Hotel, and walked up Jeremiah (Yirmeyahu) Street to the
converted market that housed the Jerusalem Post.
Moshe Kohn, a gentle, quiet, yarmulka-wearing man in
his mid-50s, showed me around the offices, which
featured some technology that was already obsolete in the
newspaper offices I was used to. Here there still were
manual typewriters, and even some linotype machines. I
have not seen a linotype machine since that day, August
10, 1978.
After the tour, we talked.
Kohn’s parents had been sabras, native-born in Eretz
Israel; but that was not true of him. He had been born in
the United States. He had been in Israel a long time,
though—since 1957.

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I repeated to him some of the things I had heard about

Israel in Jordan, and also what the young man on the bus
had just said.
“I categorically deny that we are expansionist,” Kohn
replied. “We have a moral, historical, and religious right to
the West Bank, but before the 1967 war there was no
important public opinion in Israel that favored moving
into the area.”
He went on, “But if there’s trouble, and we find
ourselves in Amman, we’re likely to say,‘To hell with it—
they started it.’ Besides, we have a historical presence
there, too.
“But let me say this,” Kohn added earnestly, “If there’s
a chance for peace—real peace, not just Sadat (Anwar
Sadat, then president of Egypt) coming here and talking—
then I would favor negotiating over the land. The right to
it is ours, but we don’t have to exercise that right.
“ But if I give up Hebron and Nablus, that hurts me. If
it doesn’t, what have I given up?”
Kohn was referring to the tombs of Jewish patriarchs
and prophets in these two cities. The situation was
complicated, as usual. Although the Koran interprets
such personalities differently than does the Jewish Bible,
Moslems too revere these Biblical personalities.
“You’re saying you want something in return,” I said.
“Exactly. Ninety per cent of Israelis feel as I do.”
We made arrangements for me to have supper at his
house on Monday, following my return from Masada.

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Kohn was—as it turned out, rightly—skeptical of my

ability to get any part of the Israeli story across back in the
United States. “Look at Roy Eckardt,” he observed. “In a
lot of Christian circles he’s known as ‘that Judaizer.’”
He added that Dr. G. Douglas Young of the Institute of
Holy Land Studies had equal difficulties in getting a
hearing for his pro-Israeli point of view. This of course was
by now not news to me.
I thanked him, picked up my notes, and left. I was back
at the Scottish Hospice in time for tea. Afterward I headed
for the Arab bazaar in the Old City in search of a pair of
sandals.
Until now, I had not been in this part of the Old City. I
found it exciting, although even then it was crowded and
full of a sense of menace. But then, I suppose that at no
time in Jerusalem‘s history has it lacked some special
atmosphere, call it awe-inspiring or menacing or holy, or
whatever.
My first impressions of the Old City, recorded earlier,
were intensified by this new visit. The part I was now
visiting was new to me; but a sense of the place as the hub
of the world remained and grew. (And that was
appropriate. Jerusalem sometimes IS called “the hub of
the world,” and sometimes “the navel of the world.” In
either case, the center from which things grow.)
For width, the term “alley” would dignify most of its
passageways; but there could be few alleys like these in
the world. In fact, there was a warren of these alley-like

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streets, leading away down steps and around corners, all

of them lined on both sides with shops selling jewelry,
embroidered clothing, brass work, cheap porcelain,
leatherwork—practically anything you could imagine in
an Oriental bazaar.
The place was thronged with people, of just about every
race and nationality. I stopped two women who seemed to
be mother and daughter, and asked directions to the area
selling shoes. I had chosen to ask them because the girl
was wearing a tee shirt that said, “Summertime is Dance
Festival Time At The Met.”
This made me homesick for opera and New York’s
Lincoln Center. I knew there was opera in Israel, but I
believe that at this time it was all in Tel Aviv. Besides,
neither here nor in New York was August considered
opera season—as the girl’s tee shirt suggested, in New
York it was time for dance.
The girl herself turned out not to have the slightest idea
what the message on her tee shirt meant, or what the
Metropolitan Opera was. But she and her mother did
know where shoes were. They directed me to go back and
turn right, and I would find many shoe stores. And they
were right.
Within a few minutes I had equipped myself with two
pairs of sandals from two different stores. One was of
uncertain materials and provenance, but probably
Japanese: and for it I was almost certainly overcharged.
The other pair was unquestionably leather and

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unquestionably Israeli. I did a little bazaar-style haggling

for it, and considered it a steal at IL180. That number of
lirot came to about US $10.
I think it close to inevitable that some reader, coming
upon the preceding paragraph, will contact me, after all
these decades, to let me know that I was “had” on the
price. Perhaps this reader will even be able to prove the
truth of his/her assertion. But be reminded, Dear Reader:
Nobody loves a spoil-sport.
That evening I went to the Orly Coffeehouse on King
George V Street and had dinner—a mushroom omelet,
coffee, and a curious but good Israeli version of ice cream
that I had had before. Not very well-balanced, but at least
it was a change from falafel.
When I was out I tended to order falafel a lot—frankly,
at that point it was just about the only local dish I knew
about, if a kind of sandwich could be called a dish. I liked
falafel, and that was fortunate. But it was nice to eat a
well-balanced meal in the hospice dining room, or even to
have the occasional international favorite, such as the
omelet, while I was out exploring.
During the short time I had been back in the hospice
that afternoon we had heard three explosions. They
sounded as if they came from King David Street, near our
digs; but when I checked I could see nothing. All to the
good. Despite, or perhaps because of the effects of, my
severe ADD, I like nothing better than a secure and quiet
life. Seldom have I enjoyed it.

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And it was hard to imagine the concept of “quiet life” in

Jerusalem, the navel of the world. It is even harder to
imagine that now, reviewing this work several decades
and much bloodshed later, and in another century.
I thought life might get a little less quiet within the next
few days. We were coming up on the 9th of Av, or Tish b’Av,
that black day that saw the destruction of both Jewish
temples, centuries apart. Haters of Jews have long loved
to “celebrate” the occasion.
No doubt that was the reason for the two preliminary
bomb blasts we had heard. No doubt it also was the reason
for the ever-growing numbers of police and soldiers of the
Israel Defense Forces in the streets.
During this period I finally found Israel Hadany, a
sculptor the American art collector and philanthropist
Philip Berman had advised me to look up.
My discovery of the hitherto elusive artist happened by
accident. I’d been avoiding the Citadel Arts and Crafts
Center, just across from the Jaffa Gate—it looked
expensive and touristy. On this particular day I decided to
go down the steps and wander among the studios and
craft shops.
The street was cobbled, and was interrupted by steps.
It lead down into the Hinnom Valley. The crafts displayed
in the shops had good lines, for the most part, but struck
me as just this side of being distinguished. Nevertheless,
the street as a whole was much better than a tourist trap.
My eye was caught by a sign above a silversmith’s shop.
It read “Yehel Hadany.” I walked in at once and found two
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men and a girl smoothing off the bottoms of menorot, the

traditional Hanukkah candelabra, with files.
“Israel Hadany?” I asked. “Mr. Philip Berman?”
The response to the name “Philip Berman” was
immediate. An old man at a desk to my right—I hadn’t
noticed him before—rose, shook hands with me, put a cap
on his head, and went out for some unknown purpose. I
was invited to sit down, and the girl brought me a glass of
really cold water. Really cold water was not that common
in Israel, and seemed to be offered either as a mark of
respect or as a condescension to one’s American zeal for
ice water. In fact, at the Institute for Holy Land Studies, a
few days earlier, I had been given a glass of water with real
ice cubes.
The elderly man soon reappeared with a younger one,
sandy-haired and bearded. This was his son, the sculptor
Israel Hadany. We went around to his studio on the
“working” side of the arts and crafts center, the side that
looked out toward the Scottish Hospice. There I conducted
the interview for what later became a newspaper article.
We were interrupted by Hadany’s need to carry out a dead
kitten its mother had begun to eat.
The studio itself was a large, pleasant, whitewashed
room, full of angles. I’d have loved to have taken pictures
inside, but I had no flash. As a mere “snapshooter,” it
never occurred to me that my camera was loaded with film
of the proper speed to do the job by itself.
So I took a few pictures of the sculptor outside, with the
walls of the Old City in the background. In the midst of
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this session the 35 mm. camera jammed. I whipped out

my Kodak Instamatic and took some back-up pictures.
During the interview Hadany pointed out that because
of the tense situation in the region life was hard for Israeli
artists. He said there was no logical explanation for the
outpouring of artistic creativity in Israel, and as far as I
can see there wasn’t—there never is. Artistic creativity
always represents a triumph of the human spirit, and is
never logical.
We returned to Yehel Hadany’s shop, where the
younger Hadany gave me strong black coffee in a glass,
with cold water to cool it. Then he took me to the shop of
a photographer friend of his, also located in the arts and
crafts center. The photographer unjammed my camera. I
thanked him and Hadany, and returned to the Scottish
Hospice.
During tea I obtained even more proof—if I had needed
it—that some of the most interesting people in the world
pass through the doors of this historic building. This time
it was a man named Ringer, a musicologist from the
University of Illinois. He turned out to be well-informed
about the region—had been in many Arab countries as
well as in Israel, and sometimes had had quasi-diplomatic
status. And, he apparently was a friend of Roy and Alice
Eckardt. It seemed they were all members of American
Professors for Peace in the Middle East.

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 Bomb Blasts and Points of View

THE FATEFUL day of Tish b’Av came upon us on

August 13. But for me, all the excitement had happened
the day before.
I had decided on that morning—the twelfth—to walk
over to the Old City and to strike out at last for the Western
Wall and the Dome of the Rock. Considering the extreme
holiness of these two adjacent places on the old Temple
Mount—the first so sacred to Jews, the second hallowed
by Moslem tradition—it might have seemed unwise to visit
them on the eve of Tish b’Av.
It was indeed unwise in principle; but then, I was not a
seasoned Middle East traveler, and I had just so much
time in the city. A map I’d seen the night before in Israel
Today suggested I might find the two holy places by an
easy walk through the Arab bazaar, if one wanted to call a
walk through the bazaar easy. Interesting, yes.
Challenging, yes. Easy, probably not.
The Jaffa Gate was half blocked off by wooden horses
designed to control traffic, and it was fuller than usual of
Israeli soldiers and police. I recalled that the first dayI

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walked into the Old City I could count the number of

soldiers on one hand. As Tish b’Av approached, every day
there had been more. Antisemites were sure to view such
a development in an unfavorable light. What? Jews were
now in a position to defend themselves, and would do so
if need be? The presumption! The effrontery!
Near the entrance to the Arab bazaar I bought a couple
of packs of Time cigarettes; then I headed off in search of
the Western Wall. The Wall for many centuries was called
the Wailing Wall, to commemorate the seas of tears it has
generated in the lives of pious Jews down through time.
Suddenly I saw a sign off to my right—Wailing Wall
Road, it said. By the superhighway-sized standards of the
West, “road” was a misnomer; what we had here was a
paved path. Yet how wide could streets and roads BE in a
small space like the Old City?
An IDF soldier stood guard near the Wailing Wall Road
intersection. The Israelis took no chances with anybody’s
holy places. They remembered too clearly the episode of a
few years before, when a mad Australian had tried to
destroy the al Aksah Mosque next to the Dome of the Rock.
The man’s hope, if I recall, was to bring about the
Second Coming of Christ. It was all very confusing, and I
imagine to no one more than to ordinary Moslems. Alas, in
his pursuit of his messianic dream, the Australian
managed to destroy an irreplaceable historic pulpit. This
was bad; but at least it was not the mosque.
(As it happened, some very decent Salvation Army
people from Australia, the Reeses, were staying at the
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Scottish Hospice while I was there. They did not like to

hear about this lunatic Australian, or about their other
countryman who had attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà in
Rome. Any more, I fancy, than I would have cared to hear
about such countrymen of mine as, say, the murderer
Charles Manson. So, after my first unfortunate mention of
“the Australian connection”, I didn’t remind then about
their aberrant fellow citizens.)
Having convinced the soldier on duty that I was not
carrying anything dangerous, I stepped out onto a kind of
platform, looked down, and gasped.
It was the most impressive place I had seen thus far in
Jerusalem, because it was the least pretentious. After all,
it was just a wall. Before it hundreds, perhaps a thousand
human beings on this day, swayed in prayer. They were
divided by gender, and many of them looked like Hasidim,
or other ultra-Orthodox group members. As a non-Jew I
was not an expert on various expressions of Jewish
Orthodoxy.
The hum of many prayer chants arose in the hot, dry
August air. I had heard such chanting—davening, I think
it is called—in the B’rith Sholom synagogue at home,
when I attended services there. Here, before the most
sacred artifact of Judaism, it was even more compelling,
not only because of the location but because the sound
arose from so many more throats.
I exchanged a few words with an American man, and
then started slowly down the steps to the women’s section

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of the wall, toward the right. It was not clear to me why I

was going down—what could this place be to me, a non-
Jew? I realized, though, that I wanted to touch the wall;
and I did.
Looking at the masonry texture on which my hand
rested, I could see papers with prayer petitions stuck in
every available crevice and cranny. I don’t know why it
meant so much to touch the wall, but it did. That day I saw
holy places of every kind; but only this one moved me.
I returned to Wailing Wall Road, turned a few corners,
and found myself by the Dome of the Rock. To my Western
eyes, this lost a great deal by being seen close up. We had
of course come by it on the way up from the Allenby
Bridge, a few days ago. From a little distance it and the
compound of which it was a part had looked very
impressive and beautiful.
Close up, after I’d been checked out by the on-duty
Israeli soldier, it looked too gold, too blue, its surface too
curlicued with designs, to appeal to me. I took a few
pictures but did not bother to go inside. I did take off my
shoes and stand there in the entrance, looking around in
silent interest. There were a number of Moslems and a
number of outside visitors in the enclosure, all seemingly
quiet and orderly on this day.
One of the visitors turned out to be Abraham, a good-
looking off-duty policeman from Tel Aviv, whose last name
I am afraid I never did get. For that matter, perhaps
everything he told me about himself and his background

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was fictitious. He may have been a policeman from

Jerusalem itself, and very much on duty. Or perhaps he
was something else altogether.
At any rate, it was at this point that I started to see
much more than I had expected to see that day. That is
because he offered to show me around. I accepted; and
whatever his background or last name may have been, he
was an excellent guide.He led me first to the walled-up
Golden Gate. Through its portals either Jesus or the
Jewish Messiah is supposed to enter at the final
redemption—it depends upon one’s theological orientation.
Then we went to the impressive Crusader Church of St.
Ann, the first real Gothic church I had ever seen, and very
far from the European homeland of that great
architectural style. It was clear that it could serve as a
fortress upon need. Although I am no expert on the history
of the Crusades, I would be surprised if it hadn’t
sometimes served that function.
After that we clambered around in excavations which I
assumed were of the Pool of Siloam, mentioned in the New
Testament. Abraham told me this was the case.
Abraham’s English was not too good, but his knowledge of
Christian history and tradition was impressive.
Exiting the Old City by the Lion Gate, we crossed to the
Mount of Olives, which turned out to be truly a mount—
the roadway up from our side seemed close to vertical, or
at least as close to vertical as one could drive a car or jeep
up. At the foot is the traditional Garden of Gesthemane,

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where there is a modern church with curious heavy glass

like bottle glass. Abraham and I visited the church, and
also the site nearby which is honored as the traditional
tomb of the Virgin Mary.
The road we took up the Mount of Olives was lined with
high stone walls, and was tough going for me as an
overweight smoker. Several times I didn’t think I was
going to make it; and in fact I got no farther than the more-
or-less tear-shaped Dominus Flevit chapel, where Jesus
is said to have wept over Jerusalem.
On the way to that place we stopped at the ornate and
beautiful Russian Orthodox Church of St. Mary
Magdalene. It was in charge of White Russian nuns,
representing the losing side in the1917 Russian
Revolution. The aged nun who supervised visitors and
who greeted us had a leathery face, and looked as if she
could have personal memories of the Revolution. If so,
they would not have been pleasant ones.
Outside, the building had many ornately painted and
carved onion domes, which made it astonishing to look at.
One expected this building to be on a snowy steppe in
Russia, not clinging to a near-cliff in a Middle Eastern city.
It seemed to be out of a novel by Tolstoy or Turgenev.
The church looked as if its interior space would be vast.
In fact, the sanctuary was a small room, covered with rich
decorative painting. Its emotional and artistic highlight
was an improbable depiction of Mary Magdalene before an
attentive Roman Emperor Tiberius. The nun told us Mary

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is here depicted convincing Tiberius of Christ’s innocence.

To seal her argument, she is presenting the emperor with
a colored and decorated Easter egg.
I’d have loved to come back to this church again, but I
understood it was hardly ever open. Abraham and I had
happened to be lucky that day.
At the Dominus Flevit chapel we met the Reeses, the
Australians from the Scottish Hospice. I introduced them
to Abraham as Australians; and to my chagrin HE brought
up the subject of the Australian bomber who had attacked
El Aksah Mosque. The Israeli said he had helped arrest
their fanatical compatriot on the day of the attack.
As we were returning down the mountain—exhaustion
having caught up with me—a loud blast shook the area. I
thought it sounded like a bomb. Abraham said it was
nothing—probably a jet plane. I doubted that—and all the
more when a police jeep raced up the hill toward us
blaring its two-tone emergency klaxon. It whipped on up
toward the Intercontinental Hotel on the summit.
(Later that afternoon, in a restaurant near the Jaffa
Gate, a man easily identifiable as a plainclothes
policeman—somehow, in any country, they seem
identifiable, even though I remain uncertain about
Abraham— also denied there’d been a blast. This matched
Abraham’s line, of course; and perhaps it was the
standard police line at times like this. The theory may
have been not to spread panic among the tourists, not that
I had any plans to head at once for Ben Gurion Airport.)

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Meanwhile, going back into the Old City through the

Lion Gate, Abraham and I proceeded up the Via Dolorosa,
the traditional route followed by Christ to his crucifixion.
It led through the Arab Quarter and was, as we say,
tacky—altogether the most offensive religious thing I had
seen.
I don’t know why this was so. Certainly at the time I
didn’t consider myself a believing Christian.Yet that WAS
my background; and so I suppose I took the idea of
trafficking in the suffering of Jesus personally.
Where tradition says St. Veronica offered her veil to
wipe Jesus’ bloody face, we ducked into a Byzantine-era (I
think) crypt. According to the inscription on the wall, Pope
Paul VI had prayed there when he visited Jerusalem. I had
been thinking about Paul since I had learned of his death
on my arrival in the city a few days before. I regretted his
passing; but certainly this pope had been no friend to
most Jerusalemites—Jews, Moslems, non-Catholic
Christians. So I did not know how I felt about him.
I DID know I was developing a mounting aversion to
little commercial establishments with names like First
Station Rest House and Christ Prison Souvenir Shop, and
to the array of junk merchandise they offered. I had heard
that only Christians lived along this street, and I told
Abraham forthrightly that they should be ashamed of
themselves.
I was also very much sick and tired of closed-in places;
but we now went to one which had all the disadvantages

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of claustrophobia, plus acid rock. It was no shrine, but the

so-called Danish Tea Room near the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre. There we went upstairs, while I mentally
evaluated the fire hazard of this place. I did not like the
results of my evaluation.
At first we ducked under an arch about four feet high
and went to a table in a corner. Fortunately Abraham
thought better of the location, and we came out to a more
accessible spot near a window. There he had a Hope cola
and I had a Maccabee beer.
But we were still in a cramped space; and I was glad
when we left the tea room. This was true even though our
next stop was the spire of the German Lutheran Church,
an enclosed vertical space that for me was one of the
greater challenges of the day. Fighting down my panic, I
did make it to the top; and the view of the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre and the rest of the Old City was
spectacular.
By this time whatever use I was to Abraham had come
to an end. I think I may have been something of a cover for
some pre-Tish b’Av police observations in the Old City,
and that had been why I had had the luck to have his
company on an interesting and historical afternoon walk.
But the interlude was over. When we came out of the
German Lutheran Church he pointed out the way to the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and an alternate way to the
Jaffa Gate. We shook hands, and he walked off. He was a
wonderful gentleman, and remains a pleasant memory.

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We had come through the teeming Old Market area to

get to the neighborhood of the Holy Sepulchre, and I had
thought with a shudder of the possible effects of a PLO
bomb blast there. Now I blundered my way through a
similar area until I was actually in the church that was the
center of the faith of Christendom.
I can say I’ve “done” it. I can also say I was unimpressed—
not with what the church stands for but with all the
unlovely shenanigans it has seen, in the name of many
versions of the “true faith.” All I could think about were
generations of monks, clerics, and crusaders bickering
over this spot, over their “rights” to even a few square
inches of the church. I thought of all the Christians—
Protestant ones, by and large—who were shut out
entirely.
While I never did learn the history of the German
Lutheran Church in the Old City, I am sure it was a
German Lutheran reaction to being shut out of the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, over which, of course, it
towered. And building such an assertive building was so
very German! At least that was so during the late19th
century, and during all too much of the 20th.
But the imperialistic Germans of that time were
probably no more imperialistic than, say, their British
counterparts. And imperialism was just gaining a foothold
in the history of my own country back in that period.
After a few minutes in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
I hurried out through the Arab bazaar; or I tried to. There

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are times when a press of people is especially hard for me

to take, and this was one of them. Especially after the
bomb blast on the Mount of Olives. All I wanted was to get
out of the Old City’s shadows and into the sunlight, or
whatever was left of it.
At last I did get out. First I stopped in a falafel shop near
the Jaffa Gate which I had visited several times before.
There I had a falafel and two grapefruit sodas. (I couldn‘t
seem to get off the falafel kick, having discovered that I
liked these deep-fried balls of grains and spices, served in
pita with lettuce, tomato, and sauce.)
In this shop I met the plainclothes policeman who
reasserted Abraham’s claim that there had been no
explosion on the Mount of Olives that day. Nice of him to
be reassuring; but I begged to differ.
There was a poster in the shop which I had spotted
before today. It said, “To Every Man A Homeland.” I asked
the policeman what it meant. He said it had been put up
by Israeli students belonging to the Mapam party. It did
not favor a Palestinian state, as I had supposed when I
had seen it earlier. Instead, it opposed the influence of the
Soviet Union in the region. Now, THAT I could agree with!
Exhausted, and with a vague headache-y feeling from
the heat of the sun, I finally came down Hebron Street,
across the Hinnom Valley, and back to the hospice. In the
driveway I met Mr. and Mrs. Reese.
“Did you hear the explosion on the Mount of Olives?” we
asked each other with barely suppressed excitement.

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All of us had, of course; after all, we had all been there

and we were all possessed of normal hearing. We were
walking up the driveway talking about Tish b’Av and what
an opportune time it would be for the PLO to make some
sort of demonstration when the thunder of another
explosion rolled over us. We scrambled onto some rocks
overlooking the valley and looked across to the Old City
walls.
“Look!” cried Mrs. Reese. “There’s smoke rising!”
As we gazed at it—it arose from somewhere near or
inside the Jaffa Gate—ambulances tore down Hebron
Street, headed for the scene. Not until dinner at the
hospice did we learn what had happened. Miss King, our
warden, said one bomb had torn up a pavement at the
Intercontinental Hotel atop the Mount of Olives, injuring
no one. The one in the Old City, some three hours later at
2 p.m., had been discovered just before it went off. Once
again, no one had been injured; but Hannah, the hospice
cook, had been quite near that blast in the Jaffa Gate.
It was not because the PLO was not trying to injure and
kill. At tea in the afternoon Professor Ringer, the Eckardts’
friend, disagreed with me that PLO members wanted us
visitors out.
“They just want to kill people,” he said. “Besides, the
pay is good. The pay is very good.”
I asked him what he meant by that; and he said the PLO
was funded by Arab petrodollars. Ringer also said his
daughter had seen Saudi soldiers in the Golan Heights,

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far to the north. I don’t know how she could have known
who they were; but if this information were correct it made
nonsense of American State Department claims that
Saudi Arabia was not a “confrontation state” where Israel
was concerned.
As Shabbat faded into Tish b’Av, the day so ill-fated in
Jewish history, I went out to mail a few more of my
interminable stream of postcards. There were things I
wanted to say to people, and by September 7, when I was
due to return home, I might have forgotten those things.
So I justified my frequent mailing expeditions.
Not surprisingly, this evening the streets were full of
army trucks with soldiers. I was able to mail my cards in
the Kings Hotel lobby, but I came back at once. It was an
oppressive time.
I had had two phone calls during the course of the day.
One was from Haim Elkind, who called during dinner and
who Fred Rooney thought might be worth a story. The
other was from Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim, from Rooney
himself.
That turned into two calls. I missed the first because I
was out mailing the postcards, and my efforts to return
that call were unsuccessful. The line was busy, as was
almost always the case in Israel in those days. As I saw it,
you couldn’t hope to have a good phone system if you had
to spend all your money preventing people from being
blown up.
(This was years before cell phones and the tragic
episode of the World Trade Center, which proved that good
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communications were not incompatible with terrible

devastation. No doubt millions of Israelis have cell phones
now. It may be hoped that they will not have to use them
as their last act on earth.)
Fred managed to call back a little after 10 p.m., and was
surprised to hear about the bombs at the Intercontinental
Hotel and the Jaffa Gate. We made arrangements for me to
go to Kiryat Anavim by the No. 8 bus on Thursday.
August 13 was actually here, the much-dreaded Tish
b’Av. At breakfast in the hospice dining room Mrs Levy
said she thought she had heard shooting during the night.
We all tried to reassure her, even her husband. But her
anxiety emphasized the strain under which Israelis lived
every day.
It was Sunday, which meant that no dinner would be
served at the hospice that night. I therefore decided to
walk over to the Old City to buy some fruit, cigarettes,
postcards, stamps, and airgramme forms. I thought
security would be tight at the Jaffa Gate, and it was. I
conducted my business as quickly as possible and
returned to St. Andrew’s. In my room I laid out books,
booklets, and papers.
My intention was to work on articles and background
reading for the rest of the day, but a loud children’s
church school class in the foyer soon changed my mind. It
was conducted by a woman who believed (I could tell from
a distance) that children could only understand if spoken
to in loud, cloying tones. Discouraged by the noise, I went

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out and had an iced coffee at the Café Orly. Then I stopped
in a Supersol market to buy two rolls, a small container of
instant coffee, and a glass cup.
In the checkout line I met a young American graduate
of the University of Pennsylvania who was staying at a
nearby youth hostel. He was studying Hebrew at an ulpan
sponsored by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, and
he hoped to remain in Israel. We discussed the preceding
day’s bombing incidents with concern and anger.
When I returned to the hospice I felt too tired to work.
I took out Moshe Kohn’s articles and Dr. Young’s articles
and started to read them. Not that reading background
was not “work,” but it was a little more relaxing than
writing.
The Levys were leaving that day to return to Netanya. I
had found them agreeable, and was sorry to see them go.
Mr. Levy and I talked that morning about the difficulty
of making “the land of milk and honey” yield a living. I
remarked on how difficult aforestation and agricultural
development must be.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It is known that when the Israeli army
advances the men plant trees. Do you know why? So that
when they have to come back in 20 years they can fight in
the shade.”
I spent a more or less sleepless night. About 3:55 a.m.
there was the sound of many, many sirens from nearby
King David Street. I had not heard any blasts for many
hours, and I had hoped this relatively peaceful state of

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affairs would continue. But the sirens indicated that there

was trouble out there.
I was spending these sleepless hours reading the
Jerusalem Post articles of Moshe Kohn. Their exposition of
what I took to be the viewpoint of many “average” Israelis
was so clear-cut that I’d have been in favor of collecting
them and publishing them in the United States as a book.
Unfortunately, that never happened.
As usual the Scottish Hospice—few people seem to call
it St. Andrew’s—was full of interesting visitors. One was
Dr. Emmy Werner of Berkeley. She also was on the faculty
at Davis, and in fact had been on the admission committee
in the famed Allen Bakke case. (Denied admission to
medical school because he did not fit an ethnic quota,
Bakke had successfully sued to be admitted, and had
perhaps laid the groundwork for the ultimate demise of
affirmative action. Whether he or anyone liked it or not,
this made him a kind of historic figure.)
A Mischling First Degree (a half-Jew not affiliated with
the Jewish religion) in Hitler’s Germany, Dr. Werner’s
survival made her feel compelled to help people wherever
she could. She had worked in India, and was here in Israel
under the auspices of UNICEF, the United Nations
organization that advocates the rights and needs of the
world’s children.
One of the organizations I was most exercised about
was the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee, or
AFSC. In the wake of World War II the AFSC had won the

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Nobel Peace Prize for its work with refugees. Now, though,
it seemed to fester with anti-Israelitism, which to my mind
was simply a new, disingenuous term for antisemitism.
Dr. Werner said the AFSC had fed her for several years
after the war, and that for a time she had been under the
impression that there were many millions of Quakers. The
AFSC, of course, kept citing the very real and very great
good it had done at the end of the war in its own defense.
That was well and good; but I believed it was now doing evil
toward Israel, and no past record could justify or excuse
that.
On this day Dr. Werner and I discussed how the
problems of the Middle East, instead of becoming more
comprehensible on site, became more complex. I assured
her I had not thought all the answers would become
obvious in five weeks, but…
She asked whether I felt frustrated by the knottedness
of it all, the sense of ever-receding truth. I admitted I did,
but added that, at least for now, I was working off steam
in my diary.
After this I went out for a light supper at the Café Orly.
On my return I got the cameras ready for tomorrow’s trip
to Masada. Which simply meant that I loaded them with
film. After the trouble I had had trying to photograph
Israel Hadany, I never again tried to use the 35 mm
camera.
As I got into bed—early—I reflected with gratitude that,
this day at least, there had been no bombs.

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The Jerusalem Post had informed me that our

President, Jimmy Carter, had invited Israeli Prime
Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat to a summit at Camp David, Maryland, September
5. The object was peace between Israel and Egypt, and I
could only hope it would be attained.

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 To Masada and Back

THE FOLLOWING DAY, August 14, I was up at 5:30 for

last-minute preparations for the Masada trip. At 6:08
there was some sort of explosion from somewhere in the
pre-dawn darkness. Could be an accident, I thought; or
maybe somebody was trying to make up for a quiet, bomb-
free yesterday.
A bit later I walked over to Christ Church Hospice. We
left from there a little after 8 a.m.—a tall, black Nigerian
gentleman, four Englishmen, a very Southern lady from
Georgia, a driver who insisted on maintaining an
obnoxious running commentary, and I.
In retrospect, I suppose I should not have blamed the
driver for his commentary. For many visitors it would have
been very helpful—but we all were keen to see Masada,
and some of the man’s diversions seemed likely to cut
short our time there once we had finally arrived.
Our first stop, at the driver’s insistence, was Bethany.
There we voted unanimously not to visit the putative
Tomb of Lazarus. Soon after that we came to a Roman ruin
said to be the Inn of the Good Samaritan. Here everybody

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else capitulated and went in to look around. But it was

already very hot, and I decided to save my strength and
remain in the car.
Then we were off on the serious business of visiting
Masada. The driver started the car again, and we were
plunging down one of the world’s longest downhill runs—
down below sea level and south along the Dead Sea. It was
a reprise of the journey to the Allenby Bridge, but in the
opposite direction.
Soon we passed Qumran, the awesome cliff formations
where the Dead Sea Scrolls had been found. To my regret
we did not have time to stop here; but it was an important
place. It would have taken hours to “do” properly; and
Masada remained our priority.
The cliffs now towered up on our right, while the Dead
Sea lay on our left. It looked hard-surfaced but inviting in
the hot desert landscape, gleaming in turquoise and blue.
Its smell was another matter. Again and again we came
around a curve and were greeted by a devastating whiff of
sulfur.
We passed the beach and the date palm groves at
Kibbutz Ein Geddi, where we were scheduled to stop on
the way back. A few kilometers farther along I looked off to
the right and said, “It can’t be, so soon—but that looks like
Masada over there.”
It was. We approached through what looked like a lunar
landscape, with the traditional ruins of Sodom and
Gomorrah lying off to our left. I looked up at the huge,

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ship-like mountain we were approaching and could make

out the outlines of the northern palace terrace, with some
of the ruins on the flat table-like summit above. I could
even see people wandering around up there. Watching the
tiny cable cars inch up one side of the mountain, and
watching people come and go up the serpent path on the
other side, I wondered if I would have the nerve to make it
to the top.
There was little time to think about it. Bus and car
traffic at the visitors’ center resembled the traffic patterns
in Times Square in New York City. When our driver parked
the sherut we ran, hoping to catch the next cable car up.
Peter, one of the Englishmen, and I bought one-way
tickets, hoping to take the serpent path down.
We made the next car. Minutes later we were dangling
over the chasm on our way up the mountain. The car was
jammed. All in all it was a very strange sensation—like
being in a bus at rush hour, but in mid-air.
At the upper cable car station I got out and surveyed the
rest of the way to the top. It was not a long distance, a
couple of hundred feet at most; but it was not encouraging
to look at. It consisted of a railed pathway that led
horizontally along the cliff face and ended in metal stairs
fastened to the rock. The stairs, too, were protected by a
railing. Yet they were daunting to a person who feared
heights. And I feared everything.
Still, going back was just as daunting; and I could not
go back to America and say I had not been on Masada. I

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forged ahead on the cliffside path and stairs. Once on the

stairs I even managed to look down and see the clear
outline of the old Roman General Silva’s camp. To my
surprise I found myself leaning over the railing and taking
a picture of it. Where I lived, Roman camps to photograph
were not something one encountered every day.
And suddenly there I was, atop Masada. But once on
the summit I did not have the courage to go down to the
terrace of the northern palace. I was told that would
involve more cliffside stairs.
I wandered around, stopping to have a drink from one
of the large metal water cisterns that stood on the summit.
They had metal cups attached to them with chains, and
signs which said “Please drink the water.” The Israeli
government also advised everyone to wear hats. Removing
victims of dehydration and sunstroke would be an
inconvenient process, involving helicopters and much
expense.
Tourists being tourists, the Israel Defense Force no
doubt had all too much rescue experience. While I stood
near one of the cisterns I heard one visitor say to another,
“Don’t drink the water. You never know who has drunk
from those cups.”
The wind up here was a constant. Perhaps it was a
constant in the whole region at that time of year, because
my memories are full of the feel of it—but nowhere was it
more assertive than on Masada. It whipped at my hat and
clothing as I moved around among the ruins. I overheard

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three American women being bored and rude in the

traditional American way. They didn’t give a damn who
built what when, they announced loudly; and they
appeared to be annoyed with their husband and father (or
male escort, at any rate) for going off to examine the ruins
of the synagogue.
I overheard one guide explaining to his group an Israeli
plan for mining the Dead Sea. It sounded interesting, but
I doubted—erroneously, it turned out—they’d ever do it.
(Now that they have, they are making attempts to put the
water back into the sea. As the human race is learning, the
ecological consequences of what seemed like a good
engineering idea may turn out to be very damaging after a
while.)
By the casemate wall another guide was reading
Josephus’s account of the fall of Masada to her group; and
I stopped, stood off at a distance, and listened with quiet
attention. The group, too, was very quiet, although at the
end people said the sort of inane things people do say to
relieve deep emotion.
I thought again that if this tale of unwavering defiance
of tyranny is not the real story of the fall of Masada, then
it should be. I still do not know on what grounds
Josephus’s narrative has been called into doubt.
The historian himself was not a particularly savory
character, having joined his people’s Roman enemies. But
his account of Masada’s fall makes sense to me, in terms
of how he could have known the details—from the

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surviving women. It also paints his fellow Jews in a noble

light; and who knows? Perhaps that is what some find
unbelievable or objectionable.
I had finally decided to take the cable car back down.
This was after a glance over the edge of the mountain at
the serpent path, which seemed to be as close to vertical
as a path could be.
My choice turned out to be intelligent. Peter, the
Englishman, did come down the path. He showed up a
little late, and with such an unhealthy glow that I still
think of him as “Purple Peter” and wonder whether he got
back to England safely.
Evidently it was more of a challenge to walk down the
serpent path than most places are to walk up. I know I
would have had to be rescued.
(As this work was being prepared for publication, I
learned that Masada had been severely damaged by
rainstorms of extraordinary magnitude. A bizarre
calamity, to strike one of the driest spots on earth! Efforts
were being made to repair and stabilize the place. But for
now, it seems, it might not be possible to duplicate the trip
I have described here. At least, not in detail.)
On the way back to Jerusalem we stopped at Kibbutz
Ein Geddi for lunch. A big tourist attraction there—
perhaps this will not be true for long, as Israeli sea-mining
efforts continue—was to have one’s picture taken floating
in the Dead Sea. There, the mix of salts and chemicals will
not allow humans to sink.

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Some of our group took advantage of this opportunity to

have a swim without fear; but not I. I did not have a
bathing suit with me, and would not have cared to be
photographed in one, either floating or sinking.
I wandered around, fully clothed, munching on the
fresh-from-the-tree dates that were Ein Geddi’s other
specialty. Also, I had a go at the lunch that had been
packed for me by the staff at Christ Church Hospice.
Through no fault of the hard-working kitchen staff back
in Jerusalem, this proved tough going. The lunch meat-in-
pita sandwich had an overpowering garlic aroma, as if it
had been fried. In a way, it had. I ate it anyway.
Toward the end of the lunch period I entered into
conversation with our driver. He was, as I had believed, a
Christian.
“An Arab?”
“Yes.”
“A Maronite Christian, then?”
“No. An Armenian.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re an Arab, but you’re an
Armenian Christian?”
“I’m an Arab now. I carry a Palestinian passport.”
“What on earth is a Palestinian passport?”
“Jordanian.”
The complexity of it blew fuses in my brain. Westerners
tend to think of religion and national origin as two
different things; but here they seem intermingled beyond
the possibility of separation.

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By the time we got to Jericho our lady from Georgia was

sick. The heat alone would have been enough to do it to
anybody; and perhaps she had eaten something that did
not agree.
Perhaps she, too, had bought a lunch from Christ
Church, a lunch that had cooked too much in the heat of
the car. Or who knew what she had eaten at Ein Geddi?
Despite the best precautions, much could happen in
kitchens. Especially in this climate.
While we were waiting for our traveling companion to
regain her composure, I walked over to the famous Jericho
tell—the remains of the place where Joshua may or may
not have “fit the battle ob Jericho”—and kicked up the
dust with my shoes.
To me the site said nothing—it was just a mound of dirt.
Its interpretation had taken a genius of an archeologist
like Dame Kathleen Kenyon, who had done much of the
work on it; and I am not sure but that her interpretation
is now considered incorrect. While I was there Dame
Kathleen was planning a new Jericho dig, but I think she
died before she could return.
The Masada trip had been a day of wonders, like the trip
to Petra. But it had exhausted me, and I was glad when the
sherut dropped us off in front of Christ Church, back in
the Old City. I returned to St. Andrew’s, had several cups
of tea, showered, and called Moshe Kohn. Tired as I was,
I had promised to come and have dinner with him and his
wife that very night.

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My Dinner with Moshe, and More

FOR SOME REASON it was difficult to get a cab to

Rehov Hantke. Also, I felt uncomfortable zipping off into
the night by myself, to a destination I had never seen by
day, in a country whose language I did not know.
When I did connect with a cab it left me off at the wrong
place. I wandered down the wrong side of the street in the
dark for half an hour before I found a man who guided me
to my worried host and hostess.
The Kohns had two nondescript black dogs and about
a dozen cats. That night they also were entertaining their
small grandson Gil, to whom I was introduced as “Doda”
(Aunt) Joan.
This was the first time I had been in an Israeli home.
Assuming it was typical, Israelis live in much more
cramped quarters than we do in America. Nevertheless,
the atmosphere was pleasant and welcoming.
(Many years later, thanks to the diligence of Patricia
McAndrew, I found myself in contact with Kohn again, this
time by internet. The year following my visit he had had a
serious heart attack, and after that additional health

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complications had curtailed his writing considerably. But

he still was doing important pieces on Jewish history and
culture, and Israeli current events. His little grandson Gil
was 25 years old when I reconnected with his grandfather.
Gil had grown to become a captain in the Israeli air force
who hoped to become a veterinarian when his military tour
ended.)
Following Tish b’Av there was a dramatic diminution in
the number of soldiers and policemen in Jerusalem.
Attacking Jews now obviously had less symbolic value
than it had had a few days ago, so it was less necessary to
protect against attacks. I must have been far from the only
one who drew a sigh of relief.
At breakfast on the 15th, Professor Emmy Werner said
the best thing I could convey in anything I wrote was
exactly what I myself felt—the overload of strain and
tension under which the people of this place live their
daily lives. According to the Jerusalem Post, for example,
bus drivers were about to begin using their microphones
to warn passengers to beware of bombs that might be
aboard the vehicles.
Back home, I reflected, people didn’t hear about the
daily strain of life in Israel, they only heard about the
casualty-producing incidents. If Americans knew more
about the tension, perhaps they would be a little less facile
about “Israeli militarism” and “Israeli extremism.”
As it happened, it took many years and the collapse of
the World Trade Towers in smoke and flame to penetrate

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American incomprehension even a little bit. But the price

was high. I was not in Israel on September 11, 2001. But
news reports suggested that even the Israelis, used as
they were to terror, were stunned by the dimensions of
what had befallen America.
At the time of this, my first visit to this part of the world,
the Israeli peace worker Abie Nathan was famous for his
efforts to bring about reconciliation between Jews and
Arabs. Nathan had a ship which broadcast messages of
peace from the Mediterranean Sea. The Lebanese civil war
was in full swing, an all-Arab production which seems to
have been more about religion than about anything else—
as I look back, I have the impression that Lebanon’s
Maronite Arab Christians were on one side and all the
other Lebanese were on the other side. This, of course, is
probably an oversimplification, and I am merely saying
how it appeared to me then, and still appears in
retrospect.
In the week about which I am writing here—that is, the
week of August 15, 1978—Nathan stood off the coast of
Lebanon with a cargo of relief supplies, which he offered to
all sides. He was not allowed in anywhere. So he
proceeded to war-torn Cyprus, where Greeks and Turks
were battling it out. Despite their differences, the Greeks
and Turks were at least united in seeing Nathan’s offer as
a good thing. They accepted the supplies.
After parting with Dr. Werner on the morning of August
15, my intent was to go to Bethlehem and Hebron. My

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diary for the time—essentially the first draft of this work—

reveals that I had a lot of trouble with the decision to go to
these places.
My problem at the time was religion; in many ways, it
still is. I understood—how WELL I understood!—that the
area over which I walked day after day was sacred to three
of the world’s major faiths; but by and large I did not feel
this sacredness myself. The only thing that had really
moved me was the wave of emotion that washed up from
the Jews’ Western Wall.
It was the emotion of people finally coming home to
what was most sacred to them, after a deprivation that, for
them and their ancestors, had endured for centuries.
Indeed, for the ancestors, it endured forever—for the
duration of their lives and beyond.
But I considered religion to be, on the whole, a
murderous element in human relations. And I still do—
the fact that we are now engaged in what appears to be a
war to the death with militant Islam has only intensified
my view. It isn’t religion per se that is the problem; the idea
of God has generated much that is beautiful. All the
murder and death lies in the belief that we and our
particular group know all there is to know about God, and
we alone possess the one true faith.
On that long-ago morning, since Bethlehem is just a
short bus ride from Jerusalem, I thought I would stop in
the Old City and pick up a souvenir for my friend Mary Lou
Epstein. Despite her last name, Mary Lou was not Jewish

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by birth; her second husband, Henry, was. Born of Italian

Catholic parents, Mary Lou had become an evangelical
Christian after she developed a non-stop, no-remission
case of Multiple Sclerosis when she was in her 30s. Her
fervent new religion provided one of the few consolations
she had—aside from Henry himself, who remained loyal to
her for the remainder of her life although as far as I know
he himself never converted to Christianity.
Inside the old walled city I went down Latin Patriarchate
Road, turned right several times—not feeling very
comfortable with the press of people in the narrow
streets—and finally bought a small olivewood cross in the
warren of commercialism near the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre. When I asked my way back to the Jaffa Gate I
was directed along a jammed arcade, roofed with
ponderous arches, that seemed to go on forever.
“My God!” I thought. “What if a bomb went off here?
How could anyone take cover? How could the police get
in?”
So I now had a greatly intensified case of paranoia, the
result of the pre-Tish b’Av bomb blasts. But this was not
the same as wanting to give the Palestine Liberation
Organization the satisfaction of going away on its account.
I thought again about the American Friends Service
Committee. I had always so respected Friends—why were
they so deluded about what was going on here? The night
before, Moshe Kohn and I had talked about this group,
and Kohn came up with what was perhaps the best
explanation of their attitude I had yet heard.
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Kohn said that, being in the business of helping people,

they were no longer able to see Israel as a fertile field for
activity; the nation was making strides on its own. So they
believed their future now lay with the Third World, and
thus with the Palestinians.
It was at least one possible answer to the question,
“What would we do if we no longer had the poor with us?”
It was human nature; but it was not nice. It was especially
not nice for pacifists, because in this case it meant shifting
to the support of terrorism. Not that all Palestinians were
terrorists, of course; but their leadership definitely was.
Other aggravations and insults borne by the Israelis:
the Red Crescent, a Moslem symbol, was recognized by
the International Red Cross. The Red Magen David (Star of
David), a Jewish symbol, it goes without saying, was not
so recognized. Many years after the trip recorded here, it
still was not recognized. Perhaps it is not to this day.
Somebody, I believe IATA (the International Air
Transport Association), had turned down Tel Aviv for
relatively low-cost Apex airfares. I had found that out
when, in planning my trip, I had tried to book directly into
and out of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport.
Somebody, again perhaps IATA, had ruled that
international flights might not land at the Israeli-held
Jerusalem Airport. For some reason it had been deemed
all right for such flights to land at the Jerusalem Airport
when it was held by Jordan.
On August 15 I had dinner with Haim Elkind and his
wife, who lived in a comfortable apartment in what had to
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have been one of the better Jerusalem suburbs. Elkind

was a civil engineer, and his wife was director of nursing
at Hadassah Hospital. She also helped to find nurses for
the kibbutzim.
The Elkinds were friends of Philip and Muriel Berman,
and had met Roy and Alice Eckardt and my Congressman,
Fred Rooney. As friends of the Bermans, their home not
surprisingly contained a lot of art. The works included an
Alexander Calder stabile and a couple of Menashe
Kadishmans. Although their apartment was not large by
American standards, I remember the whiteness and
elegance of it.
Mrs. Elkind told me she had been sent out of her native
country, Poland, at a young age; and it was just as well. As
a result of that action she was the last surviving member
of her family. The rest fell victim to Hitler’s Holocaust.
Elkind said that a few years prior to my visit it had been
the custom among Israeli young people to prove their
adulthood by making clandestine expeditions across the
Jordanian border into Petra. A song, “The Red Rock”—I
heard it at least once—had been written to glorify this act
of bravado.
But many young people were caught and killed, and the
government banned the song as an incitement. The real
incitement was of course the supposedly impenetrable
Israeli-Jordanian border. It was a challenge many could
not resist.
On my way back to St. Andrew’s after my visit with the
Elkinds I was shown the site of a blast in an open air
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market that had been set off a couple of weeks earlier. I

had watched coverage of this event on American
television, and had had the wrong impression of it. Until
now I had believed the PLO had set off this little toy inside
the Old City, where it might have done even more damage.
But the actual site was well outside the walls.
Somehow the Elkinds were among the good people I did
not get to write about. I still regret it. Certainly their lives
were interesting enough. Israel was, and no doubt still is,
full of people who had led very interesting lives. Perhaps
this is a national misfortune—who knows?
The next morning, August 16, I completed drafts of
articles on Dr. G. Douglas Young and Moshe Kohn. Then
I took them to the post office in the Old City and mailed
them to myself at my United States address. This meant
the drafts would be available to me as soon as I got home.
This was before the internet era, and it was the best way
I knew to handle my work without either drowning in
papers or losing something vital.
I made it a circuitous walk, via the Church of the
Dormition and the yeshiva gift shop nearby. I came back
by way of Mount Zion, and when I returned to the hospice
I found a letter from Aliza Geyra, a friend of my friend Addi
Agar.
She wrote that the folk singer Sharona Aron, who I had
wanted to meet, was out of the country. A pity. As far as I
knew Ms. Aron, who was the daughter of the once-
prominent Zionist Wesley Aron, had made only one

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recording. Addi had given it to me, and I had wanted an

opportunity to congratulate the singer on a beautiful job.
Now I would not get that chance.
That night’s dinner was the most interesting I had
experienced at the Hospice. Besides Professor Emmy
Werner and Peter Cowe, the young man who was
preparing to study Armenian manuscripts, there were
several other distinguished guests. They included a judge
from Tel Aviv, the noted Israeli writer David Shachar, and
a pleasant Frenchwoman.
By coincidence I had read one of Shachar’s stories in
the Jerusalem Quarterly before I set out on this journey. I
had also read an appreciation of his work by his French
translator—the very woman seated near him at the dinner
table. She was Madeleine Neige, who furthered Shachar’s
literary interests for many years.
Both of them seemed pleased to learn that anyone in
the United States read the Jerusalem Quarterly. I HAD
read it—but only once, the only time I happened to
encounter a copy. I didn’t tell that to Shachar and Ms.
Neige—but how fortunate that encounter with the
publication had turned out to be!
After dinner, by the arrangement of Miss King, I had a
chance to have an extended conversation with Shachar
and Ms. Neige. When I asked the writer what he was
working on, he said it was the cycle of novels he had been
writing for years. His original intent had been to write just
one book, but the project had grown. His family had lived

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in Jerusalem for four generations, and it was their

experiences which provided the material for his works.
Of the Shachar cycle, only one novel had been
published in the United States to that point. It appears
that since that time all of them have been translated into
English for the American market. At least two of his books,
A Voyage To Ur Of The Chaldees and Summertime In The
Street of the Prophets, are available in English now. But it
also appears that his biggest foreign audience is in
France, where the author died in 1999. It appears his
work has been better appreciated in France than in his
native country.
At first Shachar supposed I came from Great Britain.
When he learned I was an American he said he had been
there once, in a way. But his impression consisted largely
of airports and New York City, and he found it frightening.
I asked him whether he had been in Jerusalem the past
couple of days; Saturday, for example—the day of the
bombs. This generated a laugh around the table. Then I
suggested he come again to the United States, but book
into smaller universities and stay in American homes—
that he would find a small town like my own Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania much more congenial than, say, New York.
But he had a question:
“Would a grown man get mugged there?”
“No,” I said, laughing. “But I would.” And I told him
about an incident in which I got mugged in broad daylight
on Fourth Street. But I assured him it was not the usual
thing.
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We spoke about minority problems in the United

States, and he asked me if there were any American
universities at which American Indian languages were
taught. That I could not answer. I assumed there probably
were a couple; but perhaps not. Any culture is inherently
worth studying—including American Indian cultures, it
goes without saying.
But if a language no longer has speakers, and has no
literature either, it seems to me there is little point in
studying the shards of it. At least, unless you are a serious
scholar of philology.
Shachar asked me what I thought was the reason for
antisemitism. I said I had been trying to answer that
question most of my life, and didn’t feel any closer to an
answer here than I had anywhere else. The closest I could
come was that Jews were a comparatively small group,
and it is always “better” to scapegoat a small group than
a large one.
“It’s much safer,” he agreed.
Then I asked him what I had asked the sculptor Israel
Hadany: Why was Israel, for its size, so creative?
“You’re always more creative in a crisis, aren’t you?”
asked Miss King.
“That would explain it on an ongoing basis,” I
commented drily. “Crisis seems to be forever, around
here.”

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 Kiryat Anavim

I SLEPT LITTLE that night. Heavy Israel Defense Forces

guns pounded all night long. They probably were located
on the base near Jericho, where we had seen fighter
planes on our way to Masada the other day. The message
to anyone who might be listening—and I assumed the
exercise could be heard in Amman, which is only 30
kilometers from Jerusalem—was that there would be no
more surprises like the Yom Kippur attack of 1973.
Israel‘s forces would be ready next time.
Naturally, though, the effect was terrifying to friendly
visitors. To the unfriendly, such military drills could only
come as proof of Israeli belligerence; but I thought Moshe
Kohn was right when he said Israel had tried too long to
placate outsiders. It might be more useful to keep them
guessing.
In the morning I finished packing to go to Kibbutz
Kiryat Anavim. Then I raced around to King David Street,
looking for a place to buy stamps and envelopes. I didn’t
find one, although I even wandered into the posh and
famous King David Hotel, where someone was playing the

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piano in a bar. My skin prickled a little, and I wondered

what the hotel must have sounded like in the last
moments before that famous long-ago explosion.
This attack, masterminded by later Prime Minister
Menahem Begin, has been denounced as a terrorist
attack, as I have noted earlier. Later—soon after I
returned from the trip chronicled here—he signed the
Camp David Accords with Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat, establishing a precarious peace between Israel and
Jordan.
This was possible, I believe, not because Begin had
changed his militant spots, but because the majority of
his people still deeply believed in, and longed for, peace
with their neighbors. Also, Begin showed evidence of a
capacity for growth that the Palestinian Yasser Arafat
lacked. Or perhaps the Israeli leader simply did not feel
like tangling more than necessary with the United States
and President Jimmy Carter.
As I read this years later, during the premiership of
Ariel Sharon and in an era of suicide bombers, I wonder if
the Israeli hope for and belief in peace can ever be
resurrected.
On my way back from the famed King David hostelry
that morning, I did find some of what I wanted for the
kibbutz—envelopes and a razor and a string shopping
bag. The rule then—and it was hard to get used to—was
that all shops were specialty shops, with the exception of
the Supersol supermarkets. That meant that to buy six
items you might have to stop at six shops.
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Around 10 a.m. I encountered Fred Rooney. We

collected my luggage and set out for Kibbutz Kiryat
Anavim in the Judaean Hills. That is, we began to set out
for Kiryat Anavim. First Fred had to pick up a
prescription, which set me up for a longish but not
unpleasant wait in a nearby coffeehouse. When he
returned we boarded the appropriate Egged bus and were
on our way.
Kiryat Anavim, “the place of the grapes,” was in an area
whose rolling woodedness was amazing. Not least of the
causes for astonishment was the fact that the woods were
essentially man-made. The kibbutz was only eleven miles
out of Jerusalem, but it seemed a world away from the
tensions of the city.
In the evenings after dinner the residents—adults,
children, and their dogs—gathered at the coffeehouse,
which if I remember correctly was called the modin. There
they played chess or backgammon, read newspapers, and
drank coffee or tea while they talked about the news.
At least, the adult humans did these things. The
children ran and played, and the dogs cadged arrowroot
biscuits.
It had not always been so. Before Jordan attacked
Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967, this place was just
a short walk from Jordanian-held territory. The masonry
buildings still were pocked with the marks of bullets.
But a lot of time had gone by, and now it reminded me
of the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. The guest

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house—for tourism was one of the ways the kibbutz made

its living—had a splendid swimming pool; and there were
vistas of wooded hills. But there also were signs warning
walkers not to stray from certain roads, for fear of mines.
Signs like these, fortunately, never are seen in the
Poconos.
(There was a lot I did not know about the history of this
area before I arrived—that was because I had not
anticipated coming here. The opportunity to stay for a few
days had developed rather suddenly.
As I learned later, the area had played a key role in the
1948 Israeli War for Independence, with the famed Harel
Brigade fighting to get supplies to besieged Jerusalem.
Near Kiryat Anavim are what are known as the Convoy
Skeletons, burned-out armored cars and trucks
destroyed during this effort. They have been left by the
side of the road as a memorial to their crews. I saw some
of them, guessed what they were, but never asked about
them.That was because, at the time, there was no logical
person to ask.
In addition to the Convoy Skeletons, another evidence
of the War for Independence, and subsequent wars as
well, is located at Kiryat Anavim. A large military
cemetery.
I did not see this. Nobody mentioned it, or took me to it,
although it was at least alluded to in a conversation I had
with a kibbutznik. Why was my ignorance allowed to
persist? I can’t imagine. I would have been interested—I

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AM interested—and I can only believe they thought I

would not be. Too bad. But people generally came here on
vacation, either a traditional one or a working vacation.
The morning after I arrived I was scheduled to get up at
4 a.m. I had been able to arrange to work for a few days on
the kibbutz, to find out what that experience was like. This
was possible only because I had unusual connections.
Otherwise, I gathered that if you wanted to work on a
kibbutz you went through channels, signed up for a
period of some months, and did not just drop in.
But I just dropped in.
I had assigned myself to what they called the
plantation, the area where fruit was grown. Apples—but
not grapes. The name Kiryat Anavim suggests, accurately,
that the founders of the kibbutz wished to establish a
vineyard and winery here. They did just that; but the
grapes did not adapt to the idea. Apples, on the other
hand, did well.
Besides the plantation, the kibbutz had the guest
house, cows, and a chicken house. (Fred was assigned
chiefly to the chicken house, which had the effect of
converting him to vegetarianism—not, I gather, because it
was worse than other such commercial poultry setups,
but because it was bad enough for him.)
Kiryat Anavim had a communal dining room; but at this
kibbutz children lived with their parents. At some other
kibbutzim this was not true. The children’s house had
been part of the early kibbutz movement, and still

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prevailed on some, but not all, of the kibbutzim. But not

here.
It did not occur to me when I was there that what I was
seeing was most likely the beginning of the end of the
kibbutz movement. The original Zionist passion spent, the
movement could not survive for long. In many ways it is a
pity—I remember those evenings in the dusk at the
coffeehouse, several generations gathered together, from
small children to their grandparents and great-
grandparents. It seemed to me that this mingling of
generations was the way society should be.
Since I know that at least one of the Israeli kibbutzim
recently was closed and sold off, perhaps these
recollections of a stay at such a social experiment may
have special interest to future readers. The day may come
when the institution known as the kibbutz, and the
experience it offers, will no longer be available to be
experienced. And, from my point of view, that will be a sad
day.
At Kiryat Anavim there were volunteers from the United
States, England, Australia, Japan, Finland, Denmark,
and other countries. Many of them were Christians,
chiefly evangelicals.
There were no German volunteers—too many of the
older residents of Kiryat Anavim were survivors of German
concentration camps. Reconciliation was not likely to
come from them; only younger Jews could afford to be
reconciled to younger Germans.

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Having said that, I must admit that such reconciliation

seems to be happening. Despite the dark elements in its
past, Germany has made great strides back toward
civilized standards, and has been for the most part a
supportive friend of Israel.
Now to the life of a volunteer at Kiryat Anavim.
Newcomers were issued sheets, blankets, towels, a paper
bag full of laundry soap powder for hand washing, a paper
bag full of arrowroot biscuits, work clothes as necessary,
and sometimes a melon. Beds, usually two to a room, were
thin, narrow foam mattresses laid across a plywood base
on a frame.
Smokers were entitled to 19 free packs of cigarettes a
month. Everyone got free postage stamps, and the
necessities sold at the kibbutz store were tax-free and
bought with coupons.
Coming in, we bought coupons with the money we had
with us. I don’t know how it worked after the initial phase,
except that the volunteers got paid 240 lirot. Presumably,
if one stayed around, this would have been IL 240 a
month. At the time of which I write, 240 lirot came to a
whopping US $13.03. This cannot be thought of as a high-
end job.
The volunteers’ “facilities” at Kiryat Anavim were
located in buildings behind the residence hall in which I
was staying. One building housed the men’s and women’s
toilets, separated as they would have been in the United
States at that time. The other contained the men’s and

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women’s showers, also separated as they would have been

in the United States, but with no protection from casual
glances or brazen stares. How I wished we had been
issued shower curtains!
Lack of privacy no doubt would be the hardest thing to
get over in any social arrangement. From my point of view,
that problem would have been enough by itself to kill the
kibbutz movement. Or any movement.
Volunteers could arrange to have their dirty clothing
done at the kibbutz laundry; but most chose to do hand
washing rather than wait a week for the return of their
things. The halls and open windows of the residence were
thus festooned with shirts, shorts, and underwear, men’s
as well as women’s.
At the coffeehouse, I made friends with a large yellow
dog to whom I fed arrowroot biscuits, and with a small
redheaded boy who climbed onto my lap without
provocation.
During my stay I also reacquainted myself with
chickens, if only from a distance. Although I grew up on a
farm, I had forgotten that they awaken at ridiculously
early hours—such as 2:30 a.m. Or perhaps they were only
crying out in their sleep. From what I have since learned,
the life of poultry in a factory farm setting is nothing but
a nightmare at best.
Anyway, when there are thousands of them nearby you
notice the sound.
At 4:20 a.m. on the morning of August 18 I noticed a
different sound. It was the distant rattle of shots, of which
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I was getting a little sick. Millie, the Israeli girl living in the
room adjoining mine, said that if one lived in the cities one
got used to it. I said that was a dreadful thought.
I maintained that one shouldn’t have to get used to it,
although I suppose it is now a commonplace in the life of
every city as well. And as far as Israeli cities were
concerned, how do you disband the Palestine Liberation
Organization and the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine? They were the ones doing the shooting.
At the time of my 1978 visit few even imagined how
much worse it could get.
Haim Elkind did anticipate more of the same, and
worse. The terrorists were trying to spoil the Camp David
peace talks between Prime Minister Menachem Begin and
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Under no circumstances
did they wish President Jimmy Carter to be able to
mediate any kind of agreement between Israel and Egypt.
Having been aroused by the chickens—I thought of
poor Fred Rooney, who was probably up there in the
poultry house with them at this hostile hour—I had
remained awake. Perhaps that is why I heard the
gunshots.
At five a.m. about half a dozen of us went to work in the
apple shed, sorting apples by size and fitness. The apples
were dumped onto a conveyor belt, and from there were
shunted onto the revolving round tables at which we
worked, one person to a table. The fruit did not come too
fast for even me to deal with, despite my limitations of
speed and strength.
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A little before seven a.m. we were sent in for breakfast.

Tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers, plain yogurt, and
cheeses are a revolting sight for the average Anglo-Saxon
at that hour of the morning. But there they were, obvious
favorites with the permanent residents as well as with
many of the other volunteers.
But there also was a kind of porridge—or perhaps it was
much-cooked oatmeal. I took some of it; and, following the
lead of others, ladled a dollop of what looked like warm
chocolate pudding onto it.
The combination looked more promising—more
breakfast-like— than the vegetables, yogurt, and cheeses.
In fact, it turned out to be tasty. With it I had a cup of
strong tea. Returning to the apple shed, I climbed onto a
flatbed wagon attached to a tractor. This conveyance was
supposed to take us out to the orchard to pick more fruit.
I was the first onto the wagon. Not paying any attention
to me, the driver came along, clambered onto the tractor,
and started it with a jerk. I was lucky to be able to grab
part of the wagon frame and save myself from being
pitched off.
To me, the rest of the ride was almost as hair-raising,
although the others appeared to take it in their stride. A
couple of them even rode the fenders of the tractor itself on
the way to the orchard.
There we were each given a large oval bucket with a
shoulder strap, and set to work. None of the trees seemed
to be much more than 10 feet or so high, so most of us
worked on the ground. We took our filled buckets to a
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central spot where we dumped the contents into large,

oblong plastic containers that looked like dishpans. These
containers were much sturdier than dishpans, though,
and it took many baskets of apples to fill them.
It was hot, tiring work. Yet it was relaxing, too, because
my attention was limited to the richly-burdened trees, and
even more narrowly to the fruit I was picking at the
moment.
Around 10 a.m., during our break, we were startled by
a couple of loud sonic booms. But at least they were
identifiably that—sonic booms, not bombs or gunfire. We
were able to relax as the sounds died away.
I didn’t talk much during that work day. Except for the
supervisor and one or two other people, who were
speaking Hebrew (not that realizing that did me much
good for communication purposes), most of the people
around seemed to be Finns.
At least, what they were speaking was neither
Germanic nor Romance; and it was certainly not Hebrew
or Arabic. Fred had told me there were a lot of Finns on the
kibbutz, Christian Zionists; and so I drew my own
conclusions.
They knew almost no English, but in other ways we
communicated. One of the women gave me a bunch of
white grapes. I ate them, unwashed, spray and all. They
were tart and refreshing. I thought they might be left over
from the vineyards which had given Kiryat Anavim its
name, Place of the Grapes.

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I myself had seen some purple grapes hanging in the

undergrowth near the orchard, but had not tried to reach
them. Those had looked like Concord grapes.
We came back from the orchard early because it was
Shabbat eve. This time it was my turn to ride the tractor
fender. I had done such things as a school girl, hitching a
ride home from school in rural Mahoning Valley when
hitching a ride still was safe. Here I was safe with my
companions, but I thought a great deal about the dangers
of being thrown off the machine.
I took a quick shower—all the quicker because of my
discomfort at the lack of shower curtains—and went to
lunch. I found the food somewhat mysterious but good.
After getting cigarettes at the guest house I returned to
the volunteer dormitory, washed out my work clothing,
and took a nap. This was one of the pluses for plantation
work. You finished early, about one o’clock on regular
days, and could be the first to shower, and could catch up
on the sleep you lost by getting up at four a.m.
Another plus had to do with personal marketing, so to
speak. Every ad about kibbutz life I had ever seen showed
pictures of happy young people picking fruit. Who, then,
would want to do anything else? Most especially, who
would wish to be stuck in the poultry house, like poor Fred
Rooney?
Fred was very popular among the volunteers, and that
was because he was always doing something nice for
people. For example, when Margarethe, a volunteer from

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Sweden, had a birthday, he made an apple cake with

vanilla sauce. It was meant to be a surprise—and for the
birthday celebrant it really was. She had gone off to
Jerusalem, and he hoped she’d get back early. She didn’t;
for her, the planned party had really been a surprise.
Around nine o’clock in the evening the rest of us gathered
and ate most of the cake.
Fred carefully saved one piece for the absent guest of
honor, who was touched that anyone had remembered. So
the next day she invited the whole hall to her room for
what amounted to a banquet—crackers and cheese, nuts,
candy, cake, sweet rolls, and something resembling crisp
potato sticks. What these really were I have no idea to this
day; they tasted more like falafel than like potatoes.
After an afternoon tea with all those courses I only went
to dinner because it was the weekly Shabbat meal. I had
heard this was special; and indeed it was. For one thing,
it was was served by waiters and waitresses instead of
being doled out cafeteria style.
People dressed in their Shabbat best—the children
were especially tidy, and the men wore sport shirts and
slacks instead of their usual work clothing. Many of the
women wore long, flowing caftans, or slacks, or skirts with
beautiful hand embroidery.
We had chicken soup, roast chicken done to perfection,
vegetables, bread, beets and horseradish, mineral water,
and of course the Kiddush wine. A woman played the
piano before the meal, and Shabbat songs were sung.

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The songs stirred me deeply. Some of the people around

me were here only by a miracle Although my footsteps had
not passed through the hell of the Nazis’concentration
camps, it seemed a miracle as well (if a lesser one) that I
myself was here. I imagined myself able to contribute in
some small way to justice and to reconciliation because I
had been able to come here. In the ensuing years I have
had ample reason to suppose I was mistaken in that
imagining. Although it was not wrong of me to try. I
continue to believe that everyone has an obligation to help
create a little more justice and kindness in the world.
After Shabbat dinner the throng that collected around
the coffeehouse was greater than it had been the night
before, and the children played on a tractor parked
nearby. I could not find the dog friend I had made on last
night’s trip to the coffeehouse. Instead I found another.
Her name was Zukar, or Sugar; and she cemented our
friendship by taking four arrowroot biscuits from my
hand, one after another. This ritual was performed with
great solemnity.
In general, the kibbutz dogs were friendly and would
approach whether or not you had something to give them.
The kibbutz cats were another matter. I had seen about
five of them by this time, and they were unapproachable.
They seemed to look at people with appraising eyes, and to
decide to hell with it—and who is to say they were wrong?
Being a cat person, I was not surprised at this. I love
cats for their independence. This can become devotion as

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time passes, if the human seems entitled to it. But I was

disappointed not to be able to touch even one Israeli cat.
There just was no time to develop personal relations with
any of them.
At the entrance to the kibbutz proper—or rather, to the
kibbutz farm—there was a road barrier with a sign on it in
Hebrew and English. I loved the English version. It read:
“The barrier is closed every day from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30
a.m. (At morning.) It is closed on Saturdays whole the
day.” Which was an exact English translation of the
Hebrew idiom “kol hayom.”
The sun had set; it was now Shabbat, or Saturday. Not
only would the barrier be closed, but field work would be
off “whole the day.” I decided to spend my free evening
time deciding which things in my luggage I could safely
throw away. After that I would sleep for the night, and
then explore the area next morning. I supposed the
chickens would see to it, all by themselves, that I got up
early. They did not let me down.
As I got dressed in the pre-dawn light, I decided to take
Fred’s advice and go up to the war memorial. It was
reached by climbing to the level of the kibbutz guest
house, considerably uphill from the volunteers’
dormitory. From the guest house you went up into the
Chaim Nachman Bialik National Forest.
At the top of the hill, toward the right, stood a
monument and another kibbutz that seemed to be a
popular holiday spot—its swimming pool was right along

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the road, and already in the early morning it was full of

happy, splashing swimmers and paddlers.
This kibbutz was called Maale Ha-Hamisha. When you
passed the pool you walked through a forest and along a
blacktopped road. This soon turned into an unshaded,
unpaved section which offered vistas of semi-arid hills
and valleys, off into the far distance. A drawback of this
road was that it led past a noisome garbage dump.
Once you were past the garbage dump, the rocks by the
wayside were marked by occasional memorial plaques,
and then a side road led up to what was called the radar
tower. At least that was what Fred called it.
It wasn’t a radar tower, though, and I doubted it ever
had been. It had the look of an observation post for
humans—perhaps a memorial built in the form of an
observation post.
There seemed no doubt that it had been built on the
remains of a fort, very likely a Jordanian one—the border
had been right here before 1967, not two miles from Kiryat
Anavim. As I have already noted, the effects of this
proximity can be seen at the kibbutz. The building where
I was staying was built like a blockhouse, with small
windows, metal doors, and what looked like loopholes for
rifles. The walls also retained the pockmarks of bullets.
Here, near the tower, someone had placed two tanks
and the remains of an armored car. I walked past them
and climbed to the top. From there I could easily see
Jerusalem; after all, we were in the suburbs. The view was

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vast, but could have been moreso if the weather had been
better. The sky was overcast and I could not see Amman
and Tel Aviv as Fred had suggested I might be able to.
(It turned out that some of my guesses about this place
were correct and some were not. For example, I had
encountered the Convoy Skeletons, with no one to explain
them to me. These were the burned-out remains of the
tanks and armored cars that I had passed. Their crews
had tried to get supplies through to Jerusalem during the
Israeli war for independence in 1948. The wehicles had
been left where they had met their doom, as a memorial to
those who had perished in them.
The “radar tower” had indeed never been a radar tower.
It HAD been an observation post, I think; but an Israeli
one. I had come to the Zvi, or Deer Monument. It had been
established to honor the memory of corps commander
Israel Shapira, who had been killed here.)
Standing atop it, and with some anxiety, I watched a car
turn into this deserted spot and stop. But the newcomers
did not represent danger. Soon I was joined on my perch
by a fine-looking older man. His two companions from the
car, a man and a woman, remained below, looking
around.
“Mah zeh?” I asked my companion, indicating a village
north of Jerusalem. There a minaret jabbed the sky like a
drill sergeant’s finger.
“That village? I don’t know. It’s certainly Arab.”
The minaret made that observation no surprise.

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When the man learned I was from Kiryat Anavim he

offered me a ride back, and the four of us drove back the
long way, past a church of Notre Dame that featured giant,
grotesque statuary. I’d say “Gothic”-style sculpture; but
the effect was no more gothic than the so-called “goths” of
our day resemble King Theodoric of the Early Middle Ages.
To this day I know nothing about that church or how it
got there. Perhaps it was the parish church at the Arab
village of Abu Gosh.
Noticing that my hosts spoke Hebrew and German
interchangeably, I asked, “Sie kommen nach Deutschland?”
I thought they might be visitors here.
But the driver only replied, “Yes. A long time ago.” He
did not elaborate. I could guess: these people, too, were
Holocaust survivors.
Down below the kibbutz dining hall I climbed out of the
car. “Toda raba,” I said.
“Al lo davar,” the driver replied. “Shalom. Have fun.”
I ate lunch, showered, and took a nap. Later I was
supposed to interview Fred; but he was held up at work in
the chicken house.
Fred had asked me whether I would be interested in
interviewing the “halutzim,” the old-timers among the
kibbutzniks. I would have loved to do that, but the project
fell through because I could never catch up with Dennis.
Dennis—I never knew his last name—was an Australian
college professor and jack of all trades. It seemed that, as
a kibbutz volunteer, it was Dennis’s job to do whatever

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needed to be done. He did plumbing; he fixed motors and

machines. His Hebrew was fluent, and if I intended to
interview any Israelis I needed him—or someone like
him—as an interpreter. With my few hundred words,
each, of Hebrew and German there wasn’t much I could
learn from the prospective interviewees all by myself.
But Dennis was in demand, and I never did manage to
get any interviews of Kiryat Anavim’s old-timers.
I did get to interview Fred, which was my chief purpose
for coming to Kiryat Anavim. The article later appeared in
the Moravian College alumni magazine.
During the interview he said, among other things, that
he wanted to find out the truth about the Palestinian
issue. He added that was not his chief reason for coming
to Israel. I presented the Israeli case to him as if he had
never heard it before. I did this simply because the Israeli
case seemed to me to be unanswerable in logic and
morality.
Here was a people driven for centuries like sheep before
a hurricane—though heaven knew, the Jews who could
resist often did so with doomed and desperate heroism.
This was their home, their place of origin—here, at least,
they should be able to find peace. It was, and remains, my
view that the rest of the world, which had persecuted them
to near-extinction, was bound to support the survivors in
their quest for a new life.
This support has not been forthcoming. Indeed, the
journalists who shape public opinion continue even now

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to cast strictures and aspersions upon Israel and all its

ways. This has become easier to do as the country has
begun to act in more normal ways—normal, at least, for a
tiny country under constant, and constantly intensifying,
threat.
These days the image of Israel and its armed forces
presented on “the news” is often that of baby killers, home
destroyers, and assassins who strike from the air. At least
this seems to be true in America. The press almost never
reminds us of Israel’s peril; it prefers to dwell on the
deaths of innocent Palestinian children. As if it is
impossible to imagine the deaths of innocent Israeli
children and their predecessors, the ones who did not live
to come back to their ancestral home.
Ariel Sharon, Israel’s current prime minister, is not my
idea of an admirable person. But the Israelis have been
driven to him, and the relentless hatred of their enemies
has made them more like him than most of them were
once inclined to be. Almost all the Israelis I met on this
and a subsequent trip longed for peace. That they seem to
have lost even the hope of it is a tragedy for them—and
potentially for the world.
I have learned from experience that journalists will
fiercely defend what they choose to publish or not publish
about Israel, even when their choices are obviously
twisted (a charge they deny, of course) and harmful. I have
confronted more than one such person, urging them to
consider facts they refused to take into consideration. The

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same applies to many Christian spiritual leaders—fine,

decent people who happen to have this one limitation—
dislike, or worse, for Israel and Israelis.
Why should such a situation persist? All these people
will vigorously deny that they are antisemitic, and will be
convinced they are right. After all, the Holocaust made the
old antisemitism unthinkable.
But, as I have said before, I believe what is called anti-
Israelitism is the new antisemitism. It is an example of
where repressed feelings and attitudes go when they are
not confronted in the open.
I realized, the night when I interviewed Fred, that no
matter what anyone said, people would believe what they
wanted to believe. Fred was a good person, and he did not
seem to have yet made up his mind on the question of
Israel. I hoped he would come down on the right side; but
who could tell? Hostility to the Jewish state seemed so
much the normal state of affairs that many found it
impossible to break away from it. It was like asking them
to give up breathing.
Since then, alas, nothing has changed, except to get
worse. As for how Fred’s thinking evolved, as I write this I
simply do not know.
The next day, August 20, I realized my short,
experimental stint as a kibbutz volunteer was nearing an
end. If not, I would myself come to an end. That day, after
the usual couple of hours sorting apples, we went out to
the plantation and picked some more. Unlike the Shabbat

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workday this one was full-length, and I have to admit I was

staggered by the extra hour.
In the afternoon I found Freddie Poll—an affable person
I could talk to easily. She was from Massachusetts, and
had made aliyah (emigrated to Israel) some five years
previously. She seemed to have some sort of authority
over the kibbutz volunteers. I asked for, and got, the loan
of a heavy work shirt. In my view, if I went out again and
wore it I would certainly perspire more. On the other
hand, my chances of sun stroke or sun poisoning would
be greatly diminished by wearing the shirt. Needless to
say, I was in favor of that.
But I knew I could not continue to work in the orchards
for more than one or two more days. I didn’t have the
stamina for it.
When I talked to Freddie about this that afternoon I
must also have asked for background information on the
kibbutz movement, because she took me to what she
called the “propaganda cache” and showered me with
printed matter. Most of it was in English, though there
must have been caches in the languages of other
countries which sent large contingents of volunteers. The
material was of course designed to present the Israeli
point of view. Acquainted as I was with that viewpoint, I
still was glad to have more data.
In our talk, Freddie explained something I had
wondered about but had not been able to explain. She
observed that she had often felt tension here in Israel, but

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had never been afraid for herself. I supposed that those

were the only terms on which one could live here. Many
didn’t make it, I knew, either because they were afraid for
themselves or because they required too much
consideration for themselves.
As Freddie talked I wondered once more about the
Russian doctor’s wife I had met on the way to Yad Vashem.
That evening, following dinner, I sat outside the
coffeehouse with a dog at my feet and my arm around a
tiny girl who had come up to me. I was flattered by their
attention, but I have to admit that I had bought the dog’s
good will with biscuits.
On Monday, August 21, I began by oversleeping. Still, I
managed to join the plantation crew a little after 6 a.m., in
the shed where apples were sorted. Later we went as usual
to the plantation to pick apples. With a borrowed, long-
sleeved work shirt to protect me from the sun, things were
marginally better than they had been the day before. I did
not, for instance, burn any more than I had already been
burned; and I was less plagued by flies than I had been on
previous days.
But the work still was a staggering experience. I had
intended to work two more days on the kibbutz, but now
that seemed increasingly unlikely.
While I brooded on this problem I encountered an
elderly man with a cane who was walking in the orchard.
I said to him in Hebrew, “The apples are very nice.”
He brightened at once. “Oh, you speak a little Hebrew,”
he said, also in Hebrew. Immediately assuming I spoke a
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little more Hebrew than that, he spoke a few sentences in

which I could not make out anything more than “avdah,”
or “avodah.” So I assumed he was talking about the hard
work that had gone into the plantation, and no doubt
specifically about his own hard work. He looked like a man
who had put in a good 50 years. I wasn’t going to be able
to put in five days.
The more I tried to use Hebrew the more astonished I
was at how far I had come—not that I really knew anything
at all. But I seemed to know just enough, and to
pronounce it just well enough, to encourage Israelis to try
and see whether I knew more. What ensued, for them, no
doubt was some version of the frustration I felt when they
tried to practice their English on me.
All the same, I sensed they appreciated the effort I had
made. For my part, I appreciated the effort my Hebrew
teacher, Hadassah Nemovicher, had made for the course
I had taken at the local synagogue back home.
She was an ulpan teacher, and she had had to make
many modifications to ulpan techniques to teach a short-
term, limited-time class of casual Americans. We did not
have the same motivation as immigrants to Israel, who
had need of total immersion, and who must in many cases
have bought their speedily-acquired new language with
nervous breakdowns.
I went over to the office to resign from my volunteer
position— such as it was. I do not mean to demean the
work at all; but I had been such a dilettante worker and so

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slow at it despite my best efforts, that I felt sure my

contribution to the fruit production of the kibbutz could
be written off as minimal.
The office was supposed to open at 4:30. It didn’t open
then, or anytime during the remainder of the day. I felt
annoyed and cranky about it—I had not been so tired in
years.
Somebody had said I could consult a Tel Aviv phone
book at the guest house, so I decided to climb up there to
look for Aliza Geyra’s number. We had no directory in the
volunteers’dormitory, in any language; they must have
been scarce. For that matter, telephone service at the time
was primitive—the few phone lines there were would jam
up at high usage times, making the nation resound with
one vast busy signal. Comparatively few people had
phones; the system was run by what was then called the
Ministry of Posts, and a reliable place to find a pay
phone—usually with people waiting in line—was at a post
office. During the time of my visit the “Jerusalem Post”
published a “Dry Bones” cartoon in which the aged
Methuselah of Bible fame was being interviewed.
“Methuselah, to what do you attribute your longevity?”
the reporter asked him.
Methuselah grew thoughtful. Through the next two
frames, the old man thought and thought. Finally he
replied, “I’m still waiting for them to install my telephone.”
I am sure that, in this era of cell phones, everyone finds
it easier to communicate in Israel today.

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While I was in the guest house, asking the desk clerk for
the phone directory, the English language news came on;
and I heard the end of a sad story.
The day before, terrorists had attacked an El Al bus in
London, killing one of the Israeli national airline’s female
flight attendants and critically wounding another. This
unprovoked attack had been condemned by the British
cabinet, as it should have been; but the cabinet had then
had the effrontery to complain of an Israeli reprisal raid on
a PLO base in southern Lebanon, which the PLO said had
left three dead.
Angry and upset at the moral chutzpah of the Brits—
who I adore, except for what they did to the Irish and the
Jews—I said to the desk clerk, “You can’t win with the
outside world, can you?
“You certainly were justified in the reprisal.”
“We would be justified in doing much more, but…” his
voice trailed off.
Once again I asked myself the question I had asked
many times before: Who was I, against the evil of
antisemitism? If the Eckardts and their friends and
colleagues could not make headway—considering their
vastly greater study and reputation—what made me think
I could do better?
Of course, I didn’t think I could do better. But I also
didn’t think I should give up the effort; I considered that to
do so would be immoral.
That evening I went to the coffeehouse, knowing this
would be the last time I went there—my volunteer career
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was over. The same little girl who had been there the night
before was there again, with the old gentleman I assumed
to be her grandfather. The dog Zukar, though, was absent.
But the girl came up to me again, and I sat there with my
arm around her and asked where our dog friend was.
A likeable child. All the kibbutz children were very
attractive and obviously well cared for; but they didn’t
seem to pay much attention to anybody except their
parents, grandparents, and each other. This little girl was
an exception—and indeed, her grandfather had
encouraged her to come to me.
At about 10 a.m. the next day, August 22, while I was
out in the plantation, I realized that I had used up the last
bit of my stamina. I simply could not lift my hand to pick
another apple from another branch. So I came in from the
orchard, retrieved the few personal belongings I had left in
the office, and my brief, physically overwhelming service
as a kibbutz volunteer came to an end.
In the afternoon I went with Freddie to her home. I
wanted to show her the article I had done on Fred Rooney,
and also talk to her about an idea I had had (rather
arrogant of me!) to improve communications with the
volunteers. But I was basing what I had to say on a few
comments I had heard from the mildly disaffected. Some
of them regarded Israel’s raid on Palestinian camps in
retaliation for the PLO’s attack on the El Al bus in London
as the same sort of thing as the original attack. It clearly
wasn‘t. As the great political cartoonist Herblock

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suggested in one of his cartoons, the Israelis had once

more been guilty of self-defense.
I have forgotten the scintillating suggestions I planned
to offer Freddie on that occasion—and perhaps, indeed,
did offer. At the time I was in a dark mood over not having
been able to complete my short, symbolic stint as a
kibbutz volunteer. Both Fred Rooney and Freddie urged
me not to take it badly; they said they had known people
much younger than I, and in very good shape, to give up
on plantation work after less than one day. But I was not
consoled.
Somewhere, in the jumble of things—the kibbutz was
preparing for a mass bar-and bat mitzvah, which would
take place that very evening—Freddie and I had a chance
to talk. I asked her why she had left what I thought of as
the secure and relatively unprejudiced United States and
“made aliyah,” or emigrated to Israel. I was distressed to
learn that the answer was that she had encountered much
antisemitism in America.
I should have had some inkling of this, because I went
to a college of Christian background, which accepted
many Jewish girls. This did not strike me as unusual,
because to my mind one of the purposes of going to college
was to mingle with people of various backgrounds and
learn about them. But I now know that in that era Jews
were refused admission to many schools, and to much
else besides. My college, for both moral and pragmatic
reasons, evidently was pleased to get good students
wherever it could.
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Freddie had managed to be accepted at a college in

Virginia; but she had had some bad experiences there.
Once she failed to get a music prize that reasonably
should have been hers—and discovered that she had been
blocked by a professor she had liked and admired. The
professor’s reason for blocking the award was that Freddie
was a Jew.
Freddie was desolated, of course.
“I cried,” she remembered, sitting in the living room of
her kibbutz apartment. “I said, ‘G-d will punish her!’ And
the next day she fell down some steps and broke both
arms.”
I mulled this over. Then I said, “You must have felt very
strange.” Things like this had been done to me, too, if for
other excuses than my religion. I could understand the
concept of a deep, deep hurt that festered for years. It’s the
symbolic wound that bites deepest.
How often I too had wished that God would punish my
tormentors! But in my case God never did—or never
seemed to, as He so dramatically seemed to in Freddie’s
case. On the whole, I suppose I am better off for His
omission.
As for why Freddie had made aliyah, I could see why she
would wish to get away from such treatment, assuming it
was a regular occurrence—or a memorable enough
occurrence. She certainly knew she was in physical
danger in Israel—far greater than any she was likely to
face in the United States. But she felt this was her place,

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and nobody could deny her the self-respect due to a

human being.
To illustrate her point regarding self-respect, Freddie
invited me to observe the kibbutz children: “They are not
afraid of anyone, and they don’t hurt anyone.”
From my observation, this seemed to be true enough.
But the self-respect of the kibbutz children had been paid
for, including by other kibbutz children. And in blood.
“During the war,” she said—I think she probably meant
theYom Kippur war of 1973, but it might well have been
the 1948 War of Independence—“fifty men were called up
from Kiryat Anavim, and ten were killed. One in five
between the ages of 18 and 30.” These young men were
added to the population of the nearby national military
cemetery, it seemed—the place nobody had told me about,
and only Freddie ever alluded to in my presence. As I have
already said, I learned about it only much later.
A little after 6 p.m. Fred Rooney and I went down to the
bar-bat mitzvah. It involved eight children from several of
the area kibbutzim. It was held on the lawn near the
children’s building, which had a covered playground area.
Long lines of lights twinkled from wires strung for the
occasion, and there was plenty of kosher food, wine,
brandy, a malt beverage which I found very sweet and
somewhat repellent, plus Nesher beer and coffee.
After everyone had eaten the eight young honorees gave
a show. In some ways it was like children’s recitations
everywhere and in some ways a lot more sophisticated. It

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had songs and a lot of action, and although I didn’t

understand more than a handful of words it seemed
cheerfully secular for all its religious origins.
Then there was folk dancing, such as I had never seen
before. Despite my uncoordinated limbs I had loved to go
and watch the international and Israeli folk dancing at the
B’rith Sholom Community Center, the neighborhood
Jewish center at home where I had also studied Hebrew.
I say I had loved to watch; but what I had wanted was,
of course, to do. With very few exceptions I simply could
not do the dances; I could not “remember” fast enough.
The dancers were kind enough to drag me into a slow-
motion version of Hava Nagila before I left on this trip;
and that was the high point of my abortive folk dancing
career.
There were a number of excellent dancers at ‘B’rith
Sholom, even if I was not one of them. But these young
people of the kibbutzim were “to the manor born” when it
came to these dances. In bare feet, wearing the Israeli
“national costume” of blue jeans and work shirts, they
went at it with a zest and fire that came from growing up
in the tradition. ALL their dancers were as good as the best
in our hometown group; and they had the added cachet of
owning the dances.
They had special problems we did not have back at
B’rith Sholom. The dance space was full of obstacles, in
the form of their younger brothers and sisters, who were
imitating their motions. There also was a large and homely

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tan bitch, who wandered about among the dancers, lay

down from time to time, and didn’t seem to mind an
occasional accidental kick in the head. But the young
dancers surmounted all such obstacles with good humor
and self-possession, sometimes even grabbing the dog’s
paws and making her their dancing partner. They seldom
indulged in slow dances to compensate for the obstacles
on the dance floor, either. But they did do the sentimental
“Erev ba.”
I had intended to leave for Haifa on August 23; but
nerves and fatigue got the better of me and I checked into
Room 71 of a motel-like cabin near the guest house. With
me was a paperback copy of Prime Minister Menachem
Begin’s book “The Revolt.” The roof over my head cost me
$11 a night, and included one meal a day. It was big
money at the time, but I was pleased to be able to sleep
and read for a few days.
I kept remembering the experience of attending the bar-
and bat-mitzvah. It seemed also to have made a deep
impression on Fred Rooney. He had remarked, “I always
think, when I see them dancing, ‘How can anyone deny
these people a home?’”
What Fred sensed, in watching the dancing, is that it
was beyond any doubt an expression of nationhood. And
if we assume Ra’ouf Sa’ad Abujaber was correct when he
spoke of the “terrible injustice” done to the Arabs in 1948
(and I do not; it seems clear to me that Arab leaders
created much of their own people’s misfortune), still, it

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would be hard to compare this to the injustices done to the

Jews—and at the hands not only of Christians, but also of
Moslems.

162
 Wanderings with Tzipi

HAIFA had been looming in my consciousness for some

time, but I was not to get there on this trip. The day I
moved into the room near the guest house I thought I
would go to Tel Aviv instead.
My reason for wanting to do this was that I wanted to
meet Cantor David Green’s acquaintance Tzipi Cohen. He
had described her as a young Yemeni woman with a
master’s degree in psychology. David could not suppress
his astonishment at the thought of an Oriental Jewish
woman with a university education. It seemed it didn’t
happen very often.
She sounded like someone I was unlikely to encounter
in my neighborhood back home; so I decided I would leave
my nest of security at Kiryat Anavim and go and meet her.
And this turned out to be somewhat more complex than
I’d imagined.
A little after 9 a.m. I went over to the guest house and
called Tzipi’s sister Riki Dahari. I got her husband
instead. I tried to hold a conversation with him in Hebrew,
since I had little practical alternative—his English seemed

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just about as bad as my Hebrew. During my attempt to

communicate with him a woman stood by and mocked my
accent.
Hadassah, my Hebrew teacher, had told me Israelis
were not polite. By and large this had turned out to be
true, but I had been quick to excuse it because of the
circumstances of their national life.
But this personage far outdid in rudeness anyone I had
previously met in Israel. I wanted to take the lady to a
great height and invite her to enjoy the view—on her way
down.
Finishing the call, I walked around the annoying
woman as if she were not there, and managed to be on a
10:40 a.m. local bus to Tel Aviv. The bus sputtered and
pottered its way down the mountains and hillsides toward
the distant city. At one point it backfired, making a bomb-
like sound. Gasps were heard. Masks fell from faces. I was
the only one who “knew” we were not being killed. But I
could have been wrong.
This time I wasn’t.
We arrived in Tel Aviv around 1:30 p.m. What I saw of
the city on the way in suggested parts of New Jersey. It
was ugly, lacking any charm of history or memory. Still,
Tel Aviv was a remarkable city in a remarkable country.
What made them both extraordinary was their mere
existence.
The area around the central bus terminal was a crush of
buses and taxis, all proceeding—as were the outnumbered
pedestrians—without benefit of traffic light. When I got off
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 JERUSALEM JOURNAL

the bus and went inside I was at once caught up in the

midst of the worst crowd scene I had run into since the
Allenby Bridge. I knew now why the PLO regarded Israeli
bus stations as good targets for bombs.
I found a pay phone and tried to call Tzipi’s brother-in-
law again. Nobody answered. At that point I decided I
would buy a ticket back to Kiryat Anavim, and go and get
something to eat before the next bus headed in that
direction.
In a nearby shop, over a spinach pastry and a grapefruit
soda, I reasoned things out. It was clear that I had not
understood that Tzipi’s brother-in-law was going back to
work in the afternoon. I had got all the words, but not the
total meaning—and no wonder, with a free pronunciation
class going on at the same time!
But I thought the man had said that Tzipi would be
home from work at “shalosh,” or three. Then so might he
and his wife Riki be home. If I called after three, therefore,
I might reach someone. If I had not reached anyone by
4:30, I decided, I would go back to Kiryat Anavim and drop
Tzipi a note of apology.
Just after 3 p.m. I got Riki’s husband AND Riki. Soon I
was on my way by taxi to what I thought was the correct
address—34 Rehov Pinhas, Tel Aviv. The discovery, after
my arrival, that I should have been at 34 Pinchas, Ramat
Gan, drew tears. I was rescued by an elderly woman and
a young man who let me use their phone to call Riki, gave
me a drink, and called another cab for me.

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 JOAN CAMPION

With their help, then, I was soon on my way to 34

Pinchas, Ramat Gan; and when I arrived I found Tzipi
herself waiting.
She was an Orthodox Jew; and since David Green had
met her she had married a young man named Nissim
Ishayahu, who grew and sold flowers for a living. At this
point she was extremely pregnant, but was still working at
her job as a school psychologist.
She came, barely, to my shoulder. This was a
neighborhood of Yemeni Jews; and like her they tended to
be short people, and kind and hospitable. (To me, the
strange foreign woman, anyway. Many years later this
community, to my shock and disappointment, would give
rise to the assassin of Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin, thus
apparently altering history—and for the worse. The
assassin seems to have been driven to murderous frenzy
by religion. No matter whose extremism it is—Jewish,
Christian, Moslem, whatever—religious extremism is the
deadliest brew on the planet. I am being repetitive, I know;
but I wish I could repeat this truism until the world
abandoned all the varieties of the “one true faith.”)
But neither Tzipi nor her friends and relatives showed
any sign of this kind of fanaticism. Orthodox she may have
been, but many of the people she knew were very much
westernized. She might not eat at their homes because of
dietary strictures; but it was clear that there was a deep
affection between them and her.
I ended up staying the night with her and her husband.
The next day, at their invitation, I returned to Kiryat
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 JERUSALEM JOURNAL

Anavim, got my possessions, paid my bill, and came back

to their apartment in Ramat Gan.
In some ways what followed was the most educational
part of my trip, as I stayed with, and learned from, people
as different from me as I could imagine anyone being.
Yemeni Jews had long ago been snatched from
persecution in their native land by what was known as
Operation Magic Carpet. Under this program the Israeli
government flew them to Israel, where they were resettled.
At the time of my visit, many of the people who had made
the long plane ride to the Promised Land were still alive.
Among them were Tzipi’s parents.
To some of these people, and even more to their children
and grandchildren, the Promised Land still seemed to be
mainly promises. No ethnic group is entirely devoid of
prejudice, certainly not Jews, who as a whole had been
victimized so often. Humans just do not seem to walk
away from the bad old ways. So Yemeni and other dark-
skinned Jews had not received what they regarded as a
fair share of the jobs, housing, and educational resources
of their new country.
This feeling—and there was undoubtedly factual basis
for it, since most of the available social services still went
to helping the survivors of the Holocaust—had embittered
the Yemenis. Many of them were driven into the arms of
Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s Likud Party as a result.
I was not entirely sure this was the best thing that could
happen, since I had serious reservations about Likud.

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 JOAN CAMPION

Still, it was not my country nor my politics, and certainly

it was not my place to tell Israelis what to think.
Tzipi and I spent a good deal of time talking over the
next few days, in the interstices of time when she was not
at work or taking care of meals, laundry, and other
household needs. Often our talks took place on walks
around the neighborhood, either on routine errands—
such as a trip to the Supersol—or on a jaunt to something
she wanted me to see, a regular expedition.
The things she wanted me to see, and the people she
wanted me to meet, were ordinary, and had that in
common with me, and with the place and the people I
came from. Only the backdrop was different enough to be
exotic—that, and the skin coloring of most of the people.
Not to mention their height—I am only about five feet four
or five feet five inches; yet I towered over many of the
people in the neighborhood. They looked like dark-
skinned elves next to me.
I was learning about daily life in a daily kind of Israeli
neighborhood—far from places of great historical import,
like Jerusalem; but not so far from danger. Every night
some of the residents would go on patrol, on the watch
against possible attempts to bomb buildings. It seemed a
terrible way to live; and indeed it is.
Luckily I did not feel arrogant about America’s domestic
security. Being interested in history, I never assume the
permanency of any particular state of affairs. But I could
not have imagined the devastating suddenness with

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which, one late summer day a few decades later, we were

served notice of our own vulnerability.
The buildings in Tzipi’s neighborhood would have come
down even faster than the World Trade Towers had they
been hit. They were mainly concrete slab apartment
buildings of the universal urban type. I would not have
cared to be in one even for a very mild earth tremor.
Walking with Tzipi caused me some anxiety. Her
pregnancy was well advanced and there were times in
which she seemed to be in great pain. She shrugged it off
as a woman’s lot, a point of view I did not share.
Childbirth, I thought, should be the lot of those who
choose it. But her attitude, not mine, is common among
the women of the more traditional versions of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. And after all, if somebody did not
hold this traditional view, there would be none of us
disputatious humans to begin with.
One day she and I walked over to her university—Bar
Ilan. The campus lay less than two miles from my
friends’apartment, on the other side of the superhighway
known as the Gea. Our walk lay past the foursquare little
house her parents had built for their family once they had
arrived in Eretz Israel. We went on through what appeared
to be a development of private working-class houses, then
across a field where a growth of low scrub had been
broken by a well-worn footpath. Our shadows advanced
before us—mine long and bulky and topped by the
shadow of the odd-looking floppy-brimmed hat I had worn

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throughout the trip; hers to the left of mine, small and

slight. With amusement, I pointed out the contrast to her.
We crossed the Gea—by an overpass, if I recall—and
found ourselves at the edge of the Bar Ilan campus. The
campus was a place of modern buildings, trees, and lawns
that must have taken a fair amount of irrigation. At
various places construction was still was going on. A
building donated by Mexico, for example, seemed a little
over half finished.
Although it was impossible in historical terms—it was
evident that the area around here had until recently been
desert, and was waiting for an opportunity to revert to that
state—I had expected Bar Ilan to be an old-fashioned-
looking place. Perhaps to go with Tzipi’s old-fashioned
looking clothing.
But despite her traditional head covering and long-
sleeved dresses, which some might find quaint, I think of
her rather as an advanced figure, well ahead of our times.
She had—hopefully still has, wherever she is—decorum,
dignity, and spiritual generosity to a degree I have seldom
seen. It would be good if we could educate our children to
find and develop these qualities in themselves. Their
survival, and the planet’s, may depend upon it.
I do not know from whom I learned the story of how my
friend happened to have been sent to the university—I
suspect not from her, because it does her much credit,
and she was not given to promoting herself.
The fact was, to their great disappointment her parents
kept having daughters, not sons. The Cohens were
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determined that, nevertheless, one of their children—they

could only afford to educate one—should have the benefit
of learning.
Tzipi was the one chosen; and it takes nothing from her
sisters to assert that this choice was the right one. Far
from resenting her good fortune, they clearly were fond of
her, and she of them. What she had that they did not was
a capacity for deep engagement with the world and her
fellow humans. As she put it, “I am curious about people.”
Curious, indeed. Following her graduation from Bar
Ilan she had decided she needed to take a trip to
celebrate—a tremendous leap of courage for someone
from a comparatively sheltered background. So she had
gone, alone, to the European continent and to England.
That was why my friend Cantor David Green had met her
in London.
She told me she had liked the city but had been hungry
there—she had not been able to find any kosher
restaurants, and she was not the kind to excuse herself
from duties she believed had been enjoined on her. If that
meant going hungry, so be it.
There was an ironic side to the story of how Tzipi got an
education. She must have already begun studies at Bar
Ilan when her brother Rafi was born—at last. When I
visited Israel for the first time he must already have been
18 or 19. And the story of this long-delayed and longed-for
son was to have a tragic ending. Some months after my
second visit to Israel he was killed in an automobile
accident—on the Gea, I think it was.
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 JOAN CAMPION

I am glad I was not there for that occasion. It must have

been an enormous sorrow to the Cohens. Tzipi wrote me at
the time that she found life unbearable in the aftermath of
the tragedy. I never heard from her after that, despite an
attempt to keep up communications.
I have no worry that she might have done harm to
herself. Such an idea would have been alien to her concept
of duty—to what she believed she owed her Lord, her
family, and her country. Still, I can only hope she herself
was able to recover from the blow and lead a satisfying life.
But on this first visit of mine the loss of her brother was,
by good fortune, not even the tiniest of clouds on the
horizon.
One day she announced that we were going to see Bet
Hatefusoth. This was the Museum of the Diaspora at Tel
Aviv University. She had never been there, and wanted to
go before she returned to her school duties. This
represented a major trek, from the suburb of Ramat Gan
to the Tel Aviv University campus. We covered the
distance by Egged bus.
The museum had announced special hours, and great
crowds of people had responded. The crush of people
made me feel tense and uncomfortable, but I managed to
bear it because of the fascination of the exhibition. The
story of a people uprooted from its historic home,
tormented and scattered and driven for centuries, and
then at last—at least a remnant—able to return, is full of
tragedy and drama, sacrifice and high heroism. As

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Stephen Vincent Benét wrote in his powerful story “Into

Egypt,” “It must be a great people that can bear such
things.”
The story of the Jews, of course, is not over. Whether
this is a good or bad thing depends upon how the tale
comes out.
I was not alone in being fascinated by the Museum of
the Diaspora. Several times Tzipi and I were separated. At
such times, given her shortness of stature, it could be
hard to catch sight of here—but whenever I did she was
gazing with calm absorption at some picture or artefact or
another. This capacity to be totally absorbed in the “now”
was something I often noticed in her. It gave her an
enviable aura of self-assurance and dignity.
Our trip to Bet Hatefusoth took place on a Wednesday.
The next day Tzipi felt sick, but decided to go to work
anyway. I had planned on catching a bus to Jerusalem,
but decided I would make myself useful and clean the
apartment.
As I mopped the floor I listened to classical music on Kol
Israel. At the close of a symphonic movement, a voice
chirped in Queen Victoria accents, “Let This Be A Lesson
To You.”
I chuckled, deciding to take a break, settle back, and
find out how the English teach English.
On the whole, I found, I could not recommend the
method, except for the (perhaps unconscious?) humor.
For 15 minutes I listened to educated English accents
declaim such scintillating dialogue as:
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 JOAN CAMPION

“There are a lot of birds here.”

“There aren’t many with Freddie.”
“There are a lot of people here.”
“There aren’t many with Freddie.”
And so on. For me, the humor wore thin after the first
five minutes or so.
I found Israelis very interested in learning English, and
in many cases convinced they knew more than they
actually did. (I was not under similar illusions about my
non-functional Hebrew.) I had the impression that
Nissim, Tzipi’s husband, had a fair grasp of my native
language; but he almost never spoke it around me.
Perhaps he feared that I, a woman, would correct him. If
that were so, he need not have worried. So limited were my
own linguistic capabilities that I had no intention of
criticizing anyone else’s efforts.
Tzipi, on the other hand, regarded me as a fortuitous
linguistic opportunity. Our informal “English lessons”
were good-humored sessions built into ordinary activities.
“How do you call this in English?” she asked one day,
pulling an object out of the refrigerator.
“That is an eggplant.”
“And how do you call ‘to remove the external coating’?”
As she asked the question she made scraping motions
over the surface of the fruit.
“’To peel,’ in this case,” I replied.
“All right. Will you please peel the eggplant?”
On another occasion she referred to a postal clerk as
“an old man with a bird.”
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 JERUSALEM JOURNAL

“I draw the line,” I said, spluttering with laughter. “I

know that old man. He makes change in Yiddish. And he
has a BEARD, not a bird.”
Then, afraid I had intimidated her, I apologized. “I am
not laughing at you.”
“I know,” she replied with calm good humor. “But it IS
funny.”
So passed, in an exoticism of everyday life, the few
remaining days of my stay in Israel. I regarded my
dwindling time with sadness—I had liked almost all of the
people I had met on this journey, and had become
especially fond of the people with whom I had spent the
most time: Tzipi and her family and friends. I would miss
them, and I had no way of knowing whether I would ever
visit this place and see them again.
Inexorably, September 6—the day printed on my airline
ticket—arrived. With a heavy spirit I took a taxi to nearby
Ben Gurion Airport and got on the plane. A matter of
hours later my TWA flight descended through the layers of
cloud over New York City’s Kennedy Airport and taxied to
a landing.
Somewhat enlarged in mind and spirit, I had come
home to my own country.

175
 More by Joan Campion

IN THE LION’S MOUTH: Gisi Fleischmann and the

Jewish Fight for Survival. (orig. University Press of
America; iUniverse.com)
A true Holocaust story of one woman’s “heroism and
boundless devotion.” Introduction by Simon Wiesenthal.

“Gisi Fleischmann’s name deserves to be immortalized

in the annals of our people, and her memory should be
bequeathed to further generations as a radiant example of
heroism and of boundless devotion.”
—GIDEON HAUSNER, prosecutor of Nazi war criminal
Adolf Eichmann.

“With this book Joan Campion has filled an important

gap in the history of the Holocaust… Not only all students
of the Holocaust, but all who care about humanity, can be
grateful to Ms. Campion for her dedication.
—SIMON WIESENTHAL, famed “Nazi hunter.”

177
Adapted from WIZO Review:
“Gisi Fleischmann: A Person of Immense Moral
Character”
By Joan Campion

Fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria in December, 1939, a

small group of Jews found themselves stranded near
Bratislava, the capital of neighboring Slovakia. The 318
people in the group had hoped to take a Danube steamer
east to the Black Sea and, from Istanbul, Turkey, to try to
enter British-held Palestine as illegal immigrants. But no
steamers were available to take them onward; and the
Slovakian government, bound in moral vassalage to Nazi
Germany, interned the group members in an abandoned
factory called Patronka. Despite repeated efforts to leave,
there they were to remain until September 3, 1940.
The refugees could not know, at the beginning, that
they would ever get out. It must have seemed to them that
they would remain where they were until the Nazi tide
once more engulfed them, or until they perished of cold,
hunger, or disease.
Even in this bleak outlook, though, there was a ray of
hope; and it came in the form of a daily visitor to Patronka.
One of the camp’s refugees, Elisabeth Neumann, later
Elisabeth Wilden of Ostende, Belgium, after many years
recalled the visitor in these terms:
“The 1939/40 winter was particularly severe and I
remember very well the woman who came out from

178
Bratislava every day bringing hot Kosher food for those in
the camp who required it. She was Gisi Fleischmann and
all through that terrible winter and indeed until we left she
never failed to arrive with the steaming pots of food. She
also took a general interest in our health and well-being as
far as it was possible, especially for the children and the
aged.”
The encounter thus recorded was with one of the great
heroic figures of the Holocaust.
At the time Elisabeth Wilden met her, Gisi Fleischmann
was president of WIZO (the Women’s International Zionist
Organization) of Slovakia and vice chair of the Central
Jewish Relief Committee of Bratislava. She was a rather
short, somewhat stocky woman with dark hair, dark,
expressive brown eyes, and a sense of presence, a self-
possession that marked her as an extraordinary
personality. She was in her early 50s, and had a little less
than four years to live.
On her visits to Patronka, Gisi was accompanied by a
young man named Berliner, also a refugee from the Nazis,
who drove the horse-drawn food cart. Sometimes two
young girls came with her, doubtless the children of
friends.
“She was the kindest person,” said Mrs. Wilden. “She
emanated hope and reassurance. When she came you
always thought, ‘Well, things can’t be too bad—she won’t
let us starve, she won’t let us freeze, she’ll look after our
health,’ and so on.

179
 “She was a person of immense moral character and
immense moral strength.”
Gisi thought of the psychological needs of the refugees
as well as of their physical well-being. She organized a
number of recitals at which Mrs.Wilden’s father, Dr. Hans
Neumann, and another man played violin and piano. And
Mrs.Wilden recalled that she “was very, very interested in
children. She promoted the little school we had in camp—
we were lucky enough to have some professional
schoolmasters among us, and I was 18 and helped with
the school too.
“Gisi provided pencils, paper, and books, and when we
left she gave gifts to all the teachers. I got a length of dress
material, and I think all the women got something like
that.”
As noted, the members of the Patronka group left
Slovakia in early September, 1940—among 4,000 refugees
who were able to do so. As correspondence preserved at Yad
Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, reveals, this large
contingent was followed by Gisi Fleischmann and her
colleagues in rescue work with great concern.
The fate of many of the 4,000 was tragic: Cut off from
human compassion, they perished at sea. But Elisabeth
Wilden and her parents were among 1,600 who survived.
They never forgot Gisi Fleischmann, repaying her
kindness with deeply-felt gratitude. After the war, they
inquired about her fate, as well as the fates of friends and
relatives.

180
 They learned that, like so many of those she had tried to
save, she had been murdered.

In The Lion’s Mouth: Gisi Fleischmann and the Jewish

Fight For Survival is for sale online at www.amazon.com
For further information, contact the author at
jbcampion@gmail.com.

181
SMOKESTACKS AND BLACK DIAMONDS: A History of
Carbon County, Pennsylvania. Miners, millionaires,
Mollie Maguires, coal, canals, railroads…and much more!

“We have here a superb book of history… Author Joan

Campion does a masterful job of weaving together the
growth of anthracite mining, canals, railroads, and the
steel industry.”
—ERIC McKEEVER, editor,
Anthracite History Journal

Excerpted from SMOKESTACKS AND BLACK DIAMONDS:

Wings Over Carbon County

By Joan Campion

Carbon County has never been a major aviation center;

the place simply has too small a population base for that.
Nevertheless, its involvement with flying is a long and
interesting one, going back to the decade following Wilbur
and Orville Wright’s successful flight at Kitty Hawk, North
Carolina. Dr. Joseph Humphries, Sr., a wealthy
Lehighton dentist, is believed to have been the first county
resident to own a plane. That was in the days when flight
was synonymous with romance and excitement. Certainly
it was exciting to the young boy who, one day in 1916,
watched a biplane touch down in a pasture in Franklin
Township. The pilot could have been “Dr. Joe,” although
there is no proof of this. The boy, though, was Jacob M.
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“Jake” Arner, considered the pioneering figure in Carbon
County aviation.
The sight of the plane taxiing to a stop in the pasture
was a life-changing experience, but it was not something
Arner could act on at once. For a boy growing up in the
county in those days, aspiring to a career in aviation
simply was not realistic. When he was old enough, he went
to work for the New Jersey Zinc Company in Palmerton.
Meanwhile, the aviation field was growing prodigiously,
creating both heroes and victims in the process.
Lindbergh conquered the Atlantic in 1927. In 1928
another aviator, once also famous but now almost
forgotten, decided to come to Lehighton. Martin Jensen
had been one of twelve pilots involved in the horrific Dole
Pineapple Air Race, from Oakland, California to Honolulu,
Hawaii. Of the twelve, no fewer than ten had crashed on
takeoff or been lost at sea. Jensen did not win the race, but
his achievement in placing second—not to mention in
merely surviving—gave him a certain notoriety. Now he
wanted to manufacture aircraft, and to do it in a place
close to moneyed New York, but far from New York’s high
labor costs.
The original airfield at Lehighton was the grassy center
of the race track on the fairgrounds at the west end of
town. When that grew too small, as it soon did, a nearby
field was purchased—one that sloped away to a line of
trees and a steep drop-off to the Mahoning Creek on the
western end. Nervous passengers—including this
writer—sometimes wondered whether, when they
183
reached the end of the runway, they would be airborne or
creek-borne.
Next to this field Jensen built a hangar, which became
the main exhibit building of the Carbon County Fair and
was converted in the early 1990s into school district
offices. He opened a flight school, and laid plans for the
manufacture of Jensen Aircraft. Young Jake Arner spent
as much time as he could at the place, becoming a
licensed aircraft mechanic and earning a pilot’s license.
But only two Jensen planes were ever manufactured.
The financial Crash of 1929 intervened, and suddenly no
one was buying aircraft. Martin Jensen left town under
something of a cloud; some Lehightonians had lost money
in his venture.
Jake Arner kept the Lehighton airport going, and kept
trying to fly. He barnstormed, landing at places like Deer
Trail Park in the Poconos above Mauch Chunk (now Jim
Thorpe), and taking passengers for rides. “At that time,”
recalled his son Byron Arner, “they used to take them up
for a penny a pound.”
During World War II, the hangar at Lehighton was used
as a classroom for airline mechanics. Around that time
Arner was in partnership with a man named Fred Getz.
Air shows and plane rides were a cherished part of
Carbon County Fair Week until the 1960s, when the
fairgrounds field was closed and its activities were
transferred to the county airport a few miles away. It will
never be known how many people paid a few dollars
during Fair Week to have their first personal experience of
184
flight, careening down the field toward the looming line of
trees and the drop to the creek beyond.
Jake Arner sired a flying family, including some other
professionals. His son Byron, for example, served as a
military pilot and then flew for Eastern Airlines for 30
years. He later became the owner of Arner Flying Service,
situated at the county airport in Mahoning Township
which is named in memory of his father. Byron’s son Jake
was a pilot for Air Products & Chemicals, Inc., People
Express, and Eastern Airlines. Jake went on to own
Flagstaff Park.

SMOKESTACKS AND BLACK DIAMONDS: A History of

Carbon County, Pennsylvania, is for sale through the
Canal History and Technology Press, 30 Centre Square,
Easton, PA 18044, or via amazon.com. For further
information on signed copies, contact the author at
jbcampion@gmail.com.

BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA: A City of Music. For

more than two and a half centuries music has been at the
heart of this small, famous city’s life. What kind of music?
All kinds, from polkas to passacaglias. Now readers will be
able to tune in on this long song. Published by Moon Trail
books, Bethlehem, PA. For information contact the
author at jbcampion@gmail.com.

185