Congregation Ohav Sholom

The Israel Experience - Beginnings

By
MICHAEL ROSENBLOOM

by Michael Rosenbloom (spidermr@aol.com)

My love affair with the land and country of Israel began in 1972. As a sophomore in college, the year before, dissatisfied with my own lack of direction, I came to the conclusion that I was badly in need of a change of scenery. I broached the subject of study abroad with my parents, who were wise enough to condition my study abroad on choosing Israel as my destination. I was only too happy to agree to this condition. It was settled. My junior year in college would be spent at the Hebrew University, on Mt. Scopus, in Jerusalem.

I knew no one going on the one-year program. I had few, if any preconceived notions, since I knew little about Israel. I was starting with a tabula rasa. Having never flown on a plane before, the flight to Israel in July of 1972 was surely an omen for the year to come. We flew over the Alps and then the Greek Isles on a cloudless flight that left me transfixed at the beauty below.

The idea of a Jewish country was instantly appealing. It didn't take me long to realize that one of the keys to my year would be learning the language. A whole new world was out there, places to see, people to meet and a new society to try to enter. Entering this society would be made easier the better I learned the Hebrew language. I applied myself in Ulpan and became a very serious Hebrew student. I was aware of my accent and made a conscious effort to eliminate it or at least minimize it. I was not one of those extraordinary people, who can live in a country for three weeks and pick up a language. I've met such individuals and envy their aptitude for languages. Instead I had to work at my Hebrew language skills with great diligence. As other students left for Europe on various school breaks, I stayed in Israel and learned the language and toured. And did I ever tour.

Mt. Scopus is merely a stone's throw from the Old City. It's separated from the Old City by a valley. While there were some security concerns at the time, it was only five years after the 1967 war and one year before the Yom Kippur War. There was no such thing as an Intifada. As college students are wont to do, many times we would stay up late at night. Except that in this setting, unlike your typical college in the U.S., a walled city thousands of years old was at our beck and call, beseeching us to explore it. At all hours of the night, we would descend Mt. Scopus and scale the Arab neighborhood of Wadi Joz, reaching the Old City in less than half an hour. There we would explore the narrow streets and alleyways of the Old City. We were frequent visitors at the Kotel. By the time the year was over, I knew the Old City like the back of my hand.

I fell in love with the entire city, old and new, and toured it till I dropped. Jerusalem in 1972 was a small city of maybe 200,000 Arab and Jewish residents. Neighborhoods such as Ramot in the North and Gilo in the south had yet to be built. An Egged bus could take you from one end of the city to the other in just 20 minutes. I learned the history of the city and walked it. At the time an excellent book called "Footloose in Jerusalem" was popular. This book detailed approximately ten walking tours, which led you through East and West Jerusalem. It was a fabulously informative book that taught you about Jerusalem's history, both recent and ancient, and its neighborhoods, by walking through them. The more I walked the more attached I became to the city.

I also made sure to go on all the University sponsored tours. I remember a tour in which we hiked from Jerusalem all the way to Jericho, through Wadi Kelt. Wadi Kelt is a dried up riverbed originating in northern Jerusalem, near French Hill and emptying into the Jordan Valley near Jericho. In it are three fresh water sources in different parts of the wadi, in which we bathed. An old Greek Orthodox Monastery (St. George's), that we visited, clings to the steep walls of the wadi. Another memorable trip was a seven-day jaunt to the Sinai Peninsula. There, I remember a two-hour hike to reach an ancient Egyptian temple called Sarabit El-Khadim, built to the gods for the abundance of turquoise stone in the mines of the region. The hieroglyphic-like writing on the temple walls is still etched in my memory. So too are the bright colors of the fish we saw swimming by the coral reefs of Nueba, in a different area of the Sinai. We also spent a week on Kibbutz Revivim in the Negev. To this day, I've yet to see peaches so big, or taste peaches so sweet and succulent as those we picked on Revivim. Supposedly sent to Europe for export, I've never discovered a peach in any market that compares. Nor have I ever witnessed a night sky or meteor shower such as the one I observed on the top of Masada at 3:00 A.M. one morning.

In short, from a jaded teen going through six or seven possible college majors and not liking anything, whole worlds were opening up to me: language, history, archaeology, anthropology and much more.

To say that the year I spent in Israel was a turning point in my life would be an understatement. More exactly, my year in Jerusalem proved to be a signpost from which all future roads in my life would henceforth emanate.

May 2001:

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