February 8th – Yad Veshem

This would be the trips heaviest of days. We would visit the holocaust memorial and the national cemetery for soldiers and dignitaries.

The first stop, however, was not a downer. As I mentioned, we would participate in the national arbor day and my sister and I planted in two small shrubs we dubbed Paco and Taco in the botanical gardens near to the new city center. From there we headed to Yad Veshem, the holocaust memorial where we would hear from a holocaust survivor before going through the museum.

The speaker turned out to be one of the most amazing public speakers and human beings I have ever had the privilege to meet. He spoke with such passion and clarity in a way that drew everyone into him. As he described the moment he realized his father was dead and cried there was nary a sole among us who didn't cry with him. However, for me the power of his words and the root of my respect for him came in a different way. He was no doubt a religious man, an orthodox Jew. My biggest disconnect with Israel by this point in the trip and even to an extent now was the lack of open-mindedness I'd experienced and seen, there was the girls at Ben Yehouda hassling the Christians and other less obvious things that weren't as much actions or hatred for others as simply ignoring the existence of life outside Judaism. Our speaker, a survivor of the Holocaust, with every reason to hate and distrust, spoke of the need to embrace our commonalities with other races and creeds with the power of love and respect. It was the message for which a longing in my gut had been growing for days. After the speech, I hugged him and told him exactly that and tried to hold back my tears.
The museum was much of a blur, we went through it quite quickly due to time constraints. It was certainly powerful and I would have liked to have spent triple the amount of time sorting through everything. I did observe that I don't think the displays were as visceral as I remember the ones in Washington DC being. When we left the museum we had pizza before heading up the hill to the cemetery. We listened to our soldiers sing about loss in front of the grave of Yitzkak Rabin and stopped by to see Golda Maier, we also went to the grave of a common soldier who died just last month in the Gaza conflict, it turns out he was friends with one of the soldiers we were with. Powerful stuff.

We boarded the bus to head north to a kibbutz hotel near the Golan Heights, a 3 hour drive. The bus was nearly silent as everyone fell into a deep sleep from emotional and physical exhaustion. We ate together when we arrived at the kibbutz, a kibbutz in Israel is a like a commune farm, this was far from that and had the feel of summer camp. We chilled out a little that evening, but tried to sleep at a decent hour.