Our first day in Jerusalem

As we are sitting here writing this on the roof of Ramat Rachel Kibbutz a siren sounded at exactly 8 pm throughout all of Israel and everything stoped. The cars, the people, the noise. Everything stops to commemorate the memorial.

Today was our first day in Jerusalem, the place of the Temple Mount , the capital city of the nation, where kings of the Old Testament times conquered the land! The morning started in the ancient City of David. Ronen, our intelligent tour guide gave us a layout of the surrounding area. The Kidron Valley, Hinnom Valley, the Old City, many different places we studied in class. We watched a 3-D movie that gave us the history of David and the Israelites taking the city from the Jebusites and later king Hezekiah digging a tunnel to keep the water source inside the city when the Assyrians attacked.

After that we got to go down and walk through Hezekiahs tunnel. It’s a five hundred yard walk from one end to the other and the water is anywhere from ankle to waist deep. While we were in the tunnel we took a moment in complete darkness and silence. It was really cool. (Pool of Siloam)

After the tunnel we left the city of David and walked to the south-western corner of the Temple Mount and Bob talked with us. It was just us, just Joshua, which was a sweet moment. He read Psalm 122. What stuck out the most to me were verses 6-7, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! "May they be secure who love you! Peace be within your walls and security within your towers!” There may be a lot of conflict in this world but today I felt a lot of peace at the southern steps of the Temple Mount. As a class we recited the Sh’ma facing the City of David. It was a surreal experience and felt like every time before that we had recited it had led up to that moment. It really felt like as a class we have come so far and God had done so much in our lives bringing us to this experience.

After leaving the city we visited Yad Veshem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial. The name Yad Veshem means memorial and a name. It comes from a passage in the Bible that’s says I will give you an everlasting promise and a name. In the end of the building there is a room with the names of every known Jewish Holocaust victim. The first thing we visited was the children’s memorial. As we walked through there is a dark room with five candles illuminated by mirrors and glass to look like hundreds of candles. As you walk through you hear names and ages of kids who died in the Holocaust and where they were from. One and a half million children were killed in the Holocaust and it takes three months for the recording to go through every name and age. That really hit me. So many innocent lives, children who didn’t even know what was going on or why they were being killed. There were many videos of victims stories suffering in ghettos and interment camps. One video that really hit me hard was a women sharing when she was in a labor camp her dear friend went to a nazi soldier and told him she had a fever and couldn’t work. He said to her that they have no use for sick people who couldn’t work and she shot her right before her eyes. There are countless losses we all hear and know, but hearing eye witness accounts is soul crushing. Seeing so much evidence of the brutality was just heart wrenching. Knowing that so many people took lives of innocent people or even just stood by and witnessed the cruelty is gut wrenching. Even though I have heard of the devastation before, the thing that hit me most this time was that when the death camps were about to be liberated they bombed most of them to destroy the evidence. If they truly felt what they were doing is right, why did they feel the need to destroy the evidence? It just shows the foothold Satan has on this world. How he so easily manipulates people to commit heinous sins, even against other people. What’s even scarier is acknowledging the foothold Satan has in ourselves. How far will we let him persuade us against what it good and righteous?

Tonight beginning at sunset begins the memorial for the all the Israeli soldiers who have died in the wars. It is intentionally the day before the memorial for the Israeli Independence Day so not only do they remember the wars, but remember the people who gave their lives for their country. It’s inspiring to know that the people here will never stop fighting for shalom (peace).

Written by Josh and Taylor