Day 4 - The tour begins

The official part of the day starts at 8:00am with the assembly of the tour participants that are staying with me at the Dan Panorama. The tour company provides four or five levels of accommodation according to you budget. So we leave from ours and pick up from two other hotels. There's a total of 17 today, 2 more are joining us just for tomorrow, and then 20 others are joining on Sunday - they have chosen to take a shorter tour than this 15-day one so they're missing out on the Tel Aviv (& surrounds) portion. So we'll be migrating from a 20-seat bus to a 40-seat but on Sunday, too - yay, more room for my legs!!

The tour group, so far, is made up mainly of Americans - no surprises there! They're not a bad lot and many are quite a handful of years older than me. The nicest surprise is that one couple is from NZ, although had lived in the Sunshine Coast for 3 years some years ago. They are a re-partnered couple, Sue is Jewish and Brian is not so I'll be really interested in getting his perspective of being on a Jewish Heritage tour. Better still, Sue shoots with a Canon 600D, the camera I had and sold to upgrade to my new equipment. Like me, her children have been to Israel a few times before and have wanted her to come and experience it. So the 3 of us have a bit of common ground but nearly everyone in the group is starting to mingle already so none of this is any big deal (although one sounds just like Nanny Fein's mother from The Nanny, which is a little hard on the ear, but does make be laugh because I loved the show and that character).

So we start the day visiting Machon Ayalon which was once a secret, underground bullet-making facility on Kibbutz Hill in Rehovot. It used to produce ammunition for the Israeli fighters who were fighting the Arab fighters during the reign of the British mandate in the mid-1940's. It was a working Kibbutz aboveground and an ammunition production facility underground. But only about about 40 people on the Kibbutz, who were part of the underground, knew about the ammunition production going on eight metres underground. It is now a museum where we saw the original above-ground buildings that formed the basis of the kibbutz (dining room, bakery, childcare building) and we went underground to see the equipment that was used to produce the 9mm bullets.

Our guide at Machon Ayalon

Next stop - mini-Israel. It is great for us to go there so early on in the tour because everywhere else that we go will make a bit more sense contextually. The is a scaled down model of the layout of Israel - what really is in the north is at the north end of the venue, what is in the south is at the south end, what is high land in reality sits higher at the venue. The models of the key buildings in the different parts of the State of Israel are reproduced in great detail. I got so carried away with my big camera I forgot to take any photos from iPhone to pop into the blog. Take my word for it is was really cool.

Next stop - lunch! But not lunch in any roadside cafe. I'm talking lunch at the cafe at the Armoured Corps Memorial site in Latrun, which includes a tank museum. With compulsory military service here the place was swarming with young people and more sub-machine guns! The place is also very impressive, very emotional, and very symbolic. The memorial, which was the original tower of the fortress, has been converted into a memorial by Israeli artist, Danny Karavan. It has been constructed in memory of the infantry men who have lost their lives and is called The Tower of Tears because it includes a constant trickle of water running down the inside walls of the tower to remember the oceans of tears shed over the loss of each young soldier's life. 

It's becoming clear pretty clearly that this tour has been structured to really help each of us to establish or enhance a bond with the State of Israel by explaining the history of the struggle and the price that has already been paid in keeping the home for all Jewish people protected, alive and thriving. The guides in each location are so passionate about the part of the story that they are delivering to us.

The last stop for the day is 16 Rothschild Street, the Independence Hall where the establishment of the State of Israel was declared in May 1948. We are joined in the main room by a tour group of Year 8 kids from Florida and New York so there several generations in this historical room at the one time.




My learning for the day: Question - immediately after the war, what place in the entire world, excluding Israel, took the most Jews? Answer - Melbourne, Australia. Because the Australian government was one of the governments to allow unrestricted entry opportunities to Jewish people, immediately before the war and immediately after. My parents were both part of this humanitarian kindness.

By the way, a bit of trivia - petrol is around $2.50 a litre, and the Weizmann Institute that we drove past today developed cherry tomatoes.

That's it from me for today.

PS. Blogger is a piece of crap to use. That's why I can't line up the photos with the text - drag and drop not working!