Aliyah Diary 8: Visiting Jerusalem – Kotel, Concert

Previous diary entries:

Part 1: Preparation for departure over here.
Part 2: First Few Days
Part 3: Moving In
Part 4: First Day of School
Part 5: Two Weeks In . . .
Part 6: Getting Comfortable
Part 7: Ready for Guests and Yom Tov

Introduction

Finally coming up for air a bit, we made a trip to Yerushalyim after Shabbos to go to the kotel. On our way back, we ‘happened’ into the Jerusalem Great Synagogue and stumbled upon an Eitan Katz concert:

More on that later.

Getting to Jerusalem

The ‘vibe’ is completely different – traveling from the Modiin area, with planned modern cities – tree lined streets with bike paths, parks in the medians and smooth turns – to an ancient city which has been built in all different directions at different times by different people – it feels like a different country.

Traveling to Jerusalem, you go up and up and your ears pop and pop. It is on a mountain and a few degrees colder. In fact, this was the first time I turned off my maximum air conditioning in my car and found out the engine goes off at red lights. When it is in the 70s around here in the shade, we feel cold. When it hits 68 … sweater weather. This shows how much we’ve adjusted to the temperature already.

I lived in Jerusalem as a 20-something yeshiva student and know much of the city fairly well. Apparently I was too religious to notice the throngs, gaggles, packs, and herds of seminary girls. They’re everywhere with the characteristic long black skirt and sweater / sweatshirt / pullover. Hebrew is like a distant second language around Ben Yehuda street and the Old City at night.

The Old City

Driving is a rare way I ever got to the Old City – you have basically two choices of entrance: Jaffa Gate and Zion Gate. Jaffa Gate is more accessible in terms of parking and traffic, and so I headed there – Mamilla mall, an area which used to have car repair places with dirt cheap real estate, now features fancy brands with fancy French names and logos. Not my first choice for what I would put next to a wall around the city, some of which dates back over 2000 years.

Exiting the outdoor mall, you get to Jaffa Gate which led to Jaffa … now engulfed in Tel Aviv:

Things Change

Not only has the exterior of the Old City changed, the interior is also changing. Twenty years ago I was told never to walk through the “Arab shuk” – it’s a long and fairly direct path from near Jaffa Gate to the Kotel. Now it does not seem to be a big deal – some shops are selling Jewish stuff (such as a lot of menorahs for tourists) and one eatery was staffed by Jews along the way:

Sorry for the rushed and out of focus picture – “you don’t need to take a picture of everything daddy!” I was no longer allowed to stop for pictures.

Every time I’m away from Israel for a while and return to the Kotel – things have changed. My grandfather told me he was there soon after the 1967 war when Jews gained sovereignty over the Temple Mount again after about 2000 years. My grandfather said there was no nicely paved “plaza” – it sounded to me like a lot of rubble was in the process of being cleared.

When I was first there in 1999 the entire plaza was level and there were easily movable plastic fence situations separating the prayer area from the rest of the plaza. You can see where it was, where the stone changes from beige to off-white:

The length of the prayer area keeps getting bigger and there are now solid walls with seforim (books) at the back side as well as separate exit requiring you to turn a corner – seems to for crowd control. It is common for 100,000 people to be in the plaza at certain times.

This is an even larger change:

This is to the left side – the bathrooms used to use the entrance to the “Western Wall Tunnels Sites”. Perhaps that close to the wall wasn’t the best place for bathrooms, though this is the more “commercialization” of the plaza. That’s fine – people from all over the world come to the Western Wall to learn about the place – both Jews and non-Jews.

Above that, the menorah commemorating the six million Jews who died in the holocaust seems to have been removed and there is a big banner with prayer times for selichos (special prayers before Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur). It used to be ‘word of mouth’ and now it’s being formalized and … banner-ized. Having things this well labeled is almost … American.

At the back of the plaza, where there was once a whole lot of rock, there are now windows into the archeological dig – I had no idea any of this was there. This is new … err… new-old:

The temporary bathrooms are of the type with stainless steel troughs for sinks that I haven’t seen much outside of Jerusalem. The phone booths are missing. Now that they’re gone, it’s strange to think that there were ever phones … and bathrooms … at a holy site.

The solid gold replica of the menorah from the Temple used to be at the top of the stairs leading to the kotel. Now it’s further back in another plaza, with the Hurva, a synagogue which was nothing more than a stone arch for many years since being destroyed in 1948:

A block of payphones was also in this plaza – I remember using them with my calling card to arrange getting into another yeshiva. That was antiquity. The menorah is still a thing.

This was a computer software store in 1999 – imagine such a thing so close to the kotel:

Walking out through the Armenian quarter and back to Jaffa Gate used to be a narrow road where you pressed to the wall to avoid the cars. There were some red posts cemented into the ground in one part. Now there’s an actual sidewalk:

Living in Israel, I can visit when I’d like – it isn’t far away, yet it seems so far from my modern life which isn’t in Jerusalem.

A quick peek inside before we leave

After the Old City, we stopped on Ben Yehuda, where the “night life” is (19 year old girls, mainly) and got some frozen yogurt – then I had to find our way back to our car. Now, I could put it into Google Maps or Waze or I could go in the general direction, maybe find it right away, or maybe meander a bit and wander. Not everyone in my family likes the latter method …

Unexpectedly, we can upon the Jerusalem Great Synagogue and realized my daughter had never been there. We meandered in, not even sure if it was open, just so I could show it to her.

We walk in . . . then walk in some more . . . and there’s a packed concert going on inside. We agree we’ll stay for five minutes then text each other (women are on a different floor) and ended up staying for what turned out to be the climax and last 20 minutes of an Eitan Katz concert – no tickets needed … we just walked in .. and what a find. This is certainly not something that happens to you in the United States:

Take a step back for a second and look at this from a secular person’s eyes (I was one of those). I heard second hand from a gadol that a Jewish concert shouldn’t be like a secular concert – a place to be passively listening. At a Jewish concert, ideally, you take part . . . you are singing too, not just spectating. What are they saying? It’s a great mitzvah to be happy all the time. מִצְוָה גְּדוֹלָה לִהְיוֹת בְּשִמְחָה תָּמִיד. What an amazing place to stumble on to – here is a great synagogue which is used for prayers on Yom Kippur from a chazzan dressed all in white chanting from sometimes two thousand year old texts . . . and a herd of young boys in the same place expressing joy, outside of a prayer ritual, like in few other places of worship in the world. They aren’t singing about relationships, broken hearts, sorrow, or temporal pleasures – they are singing about always being happy by connecting to G_d.

The intensity and joy is a site to behold – and only in Jerusalem can you stumble upon this.