Jerusalem

On Thursday, the competition organized a tour to the city of Jerusalem for those of us who were not busy practicing chamber music. After breakfast that day, we all met in the lobby, climbed aboard our bus, and a mere hour later we arrived in Jerusalem. Though we hadn't gone that far, in terms of physical distance, we immediately felt ourselves to be in a different world. Tel Aviv - where we have been staying so far - is a modern city. The skyline is spiked with skyscrapers. A center for science and technology, Tel Aviv is known as the silicon valley of Israel. By contrast, Jerusalem is a complex wealth of history and religion, where hundreds of important sites and monuments serve to keep events of biblical times alive today.

Our first stop was the City Hall, where we were received by the mayor, Nir Barkat, who welcomed us to Jerusalem. In this photo, he is the gentleman in the suit, front and center.

We then continued on to visit Yad VaShem, a Holocaust Memorial. (For this part of our trip, I have no photos to share, because we were not allowed to use our cameras.) There we met up with an excellent tour guide who led us on a efficient path through the exhibitions (since we had a limited amount of time). She gave our visit a sense of continuity and helped to make it special by relating several of her own family's personal stories of the Holocaust. The museum strives to tell the story from a Jewish perspective, rather than relying on German records of the events, and it also dispenses with statistics in favor of focusing on individuals. We saw videos taken of Jews in their daily lives before the Holocaust and interviews of survivors sharing their experiences as well as personal articles that had been recovered - diaries, photos, etc. The most moving part of the visit for me was the Hall of Names, which is an ongoing collection of all the names of the Jews who were killed. The circular design of the room, lined with bookshelves full of alphabetized file cases was very effective in helping one grasp the numbers involved. Throughout the museum during our visit, groups of young Israeli army trainees were being taken through as well - evidence of how important it is to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive in the national consciousness.

After getting lunch, we headed on to the Old City. We filed our way through narrow, bustling market streets until we reached the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The church was built to mark the locations of the last five stations of the cross, according to the Catholic tradition. Several different churches claim ownership over this crucial landmark - an unresolvable struggle that has brought every detail concerning the maintenance and operation of the church to a perfectly unchanging status quo. Within the church, there are ornate shrines to mark each step of Jesus' crucifixion. There are also throngs of people, so thick that one can barely move. Never have I been in a place where something as simple as a slab of rock was so charged with meaning and emotion.

kissing the stone where Jesus was laid after being removed from the cross

throngs of people in front of one of the 12th station; The Cross is Raised and Jesus Dies

With the few remaining minutes of our visit to the Old City, we were given free reign to explore the market streets. One of my first priorities was to taste the fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice that was being made everywhere we looked.

pomegranates are a native fruit of this region

the market

One day was not nearly enough time to explore the city of Jerusalem. For each thing we managed to see, we became aware of 50 other things that we would not be able to see. It gave us an appreciation for the way so many different cultures and religions have to coexist within the walls of a small Middle-Eastern city.