Wednesday: Yad Vashem and Mount Herzl

It was my very last totally free day here in Israel aside from the Easter Triduum and Monday (which is the second feast day of Pesach, so nothing is opening), so it was high time I went to Mount Herzl and Yad Vashem. These are things which every visitor to Israel ought to do, no matter one's appreciation or not of the state of Israel. Since it was going to be a very Israeli day, I decided to make it an all-around Jewish day by going to some lesser-known archaeological sites as well.

I began with a sight I've passed by almost daily- the Hadrianic plaza under Damascus Gate. After the destructions of Jerusalem in AD 70 and 135, the Emperor Hadrian completely reconstructed the city as a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, with its central entrance at the present Damascus Gate (at the center of the northern wall). Inside was a large open plaza with two roads branching off southward: the Cardo Maximus, which runs parallel to today's Souq Khan es-Zeit and has been excavated in the Jewish Quarter, and the secondary cardo, which runs basically along the Tyropoeon Valley, where today is the main north-south road through the city, Al-Wad ('Valley Road').

One enters the plaza, which has been turned into a museum, via the easternmost of the three arches through which pedestrians entered the city (picture above). The central arch is buried directly below Damascus Gate, and the western arch was covered up when the Byzantine renovation placed a chapel to Abraham beside it.

There wasn't too much to see inside the museum; however, walking around the guard room that flanked the city's principal was rather cool. Most interesting, I thought, was the pavement; it is almost identical to the pavement of Hadrian's reconstructed Antonia Fortress that one can see below the Ecce Homo convent.

From there I made my way a bit east toward Herod's Gate, where there is a deep artificial cave running well below the city. Known alternatively as Zedekiah's Cave or Solomon's Quarries- both for purely legendary reasons- this was the site of a quarry used by Herod the Great for his lavish reconstruction of the city. There isn't really anything to see, but there are traces of unfinished quarry work and it's a fun place to wander around in.

I then headed toward the Jewish Quarter to see the famed Wohl Archaeological Museum. When Jerusalem was retaken by the Israelis in 1967 they found the Jewish Quarter in ruins. In additional to plowing down a neighborhood in order to open up the Western Wall Plaza, they also took the opportunity to do something rarely possible: thorough excavations within the Old City. Among other things discovered were the foundations, first floors, and basements of six first century mansions in close proximity to each other. The Wohl Museum was built atop them in order to aid in preservation and allow visitors to access the site (unfortunately, this also meant no pictures).

These were houses destroyed following the capture of the Upper City about a month after the Romans destroyed the temple in AD 70 (and yes, the defenders still held out for another month even after seeing their temple destroyed). Each house is a mansion unto itself, likely two or three stories and mosaic floors and large mikvehot (ritual baths) in the basement. The working theory is that these are houses of the 'Herodians' that come up in the New Testament: members of the Herodian dynasty or persons related to them through financial and political association. These were, in effect, the houses of the people who didn't want to fight the Romans at all.

After a quick lunch I headed off to Mount Herzl and Yad Vashem. The former is named after Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement. Herzl was originally a mild-manned journalist, but when he covered the Dreyfus Affair in France (where a Jewish officer was made a scapegoat in a treason case in an obvious case of systematic governmental anti-Semitism) he came to the conclusion that the Jewish people would only be safe if they had a national homeland and a nation-state they could call their own. From this conclusion came the drive for mass settlement in Ottoman and British Palestine and the push for a Jewish state. His grave is pictured right.

Mount Herzl is centered on his grave, but it also contains the graves of numerous Zionist leaders, national leaders, and the national military cemetery. Most moving of all were the graves of Yitzhak and Leah Rabin. For those who were too young or too apathetic to remember, Yitzhak Rabin was a leading military figure in Israel's Arab wars and a hawkish Labor Party prime minister in the 1970s. When he was reelected as prime minister in the early 90s, he made the hard call to turn around on his former tough position and pursue a negotiated peace with the Palestinians and Yassir Arafat's PLO (who had made a similar, if less sincere and eventually abandoned, turn away from violence). After several successful rounds of negotiations, Rabin was assassinated by a radical Jewish Zionist while concluding a peace rally. The black grave on the right is his; on the left, the white grave is his wife Leah's; the painted stones are the Jewish equivalent of flowers, brought by mourners from all over the world.

From here there is a little trail through the forest, and past the monument to the victims of terrorism, that leads down to Yad Vashem. 'Yad v'shem' means 'a memorial and a name,' and it is taken from the text of Isaiah 56:5: "And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name that shall not be cut off."

This, of course, is Israel's official Holocaust memorial.

Yad Vashem is what the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. should have been. Its central museum moves along chronologically, tracing the history of anti-Semitism and its roots in both European Christian culture and nineteenth century 'scientific' racism; it has both a room entirely devoted to Gentiles and Christians who helped Jews escape from the Nazis and a separate monument to these 'Righteous Among the Nations'; it treats the Holocaust as centrally about the Jewish people but has several exhibits on all the other groups who so tragically perished; it has exhibits and a monument dedicated to Jews who fought as Allied soldiers, forest partisans, and ghetto resistance fighters; and most importantly, it leaves people with a sense of hope, not guilt. When exits the museum, after a silent walk through the Hall of Names (which cannot possibly inscribe the three million names thus far collected, but is rather a library), one goes out onto a porch that opens up with a view over the Judean hills:
I might add, of course, that this hope of reaching the Judean hills, with these trees you see planted by the original Jewish settlers, was a dream not reached by the full half of world Jewry murdered in the Holocaust. That is why museum is built in the shape of a triangle: it is one half, but only one half, of the Star of David.

This, of course, is why Herzl's dream of a Jewish homeland and Israeli state are so very important- however much one sympathizes with the Palestinians' own national aspirations and suffering. Perhaps it is true that without the Holocaust, the world would not have offered to partition the British Mandate and create an Israeli state; yes, if there had been no Holocaust, there may not have been an Israel.

But far more importantly: if there had been an Israel, there may not have been so terrible a Holocaust.

For one of the principal so many Jewish people were murdered was because they had no place to go, and no state to defend them.

In the first case, the European countries had largely closed their doors to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. In one case, a refugee ship arrived in Havana, sat in the docks for weeks, and was turned back to Germany; eventually several countries offered them safe haven, but alas, these countries included ones that Nazi Germany would eventually conquer: Belgium and the Netherlands. Many fled for British Palestine, but in order to maintain good relations with the Arab population (both because of a pro-Arab bias in the Foreign Ministry and because of a desire to keep the oil flowing), the British refused more than minimal immigration numbers.

In the second case, states exist not merely to serve their own citizens, but their national expatriate communities as well. This is far from the American way of thinking about a nation-state (not surprising, as Americans really aren't a nation-state in this sense), but it's simply how it works. Armenians here in Israel may not be citizens of Armenia, but it's the Armenian state that protects and defends them. The Turks are afraid of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq not because they care about Iraq, but because the existence of a Kurdish state would mean that their own Kurdish population would have a defender and advocate, even if Turkish Kurds weren't citizens of Kurdistan. Even China- communist, atheist China- has come to the defense of the ethnic Chinese Christian community in Jakarta whenever that community has come under threat of violent attacks from Indonesian Muslim radicals.

This, of course, is exactly what happened when the Arab societies attempted to wipe out the Middle Eastern Jewish communities in the five years following the establishment of Israel. The Yemenite, Egyptian, Iraqi, and North African Jews would have all been murdered- wiped out as whole communities- were it not for the fact that Israel was there to defend them and offer them a place to go. The airlift of the Jewish populations of these countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s makes the contemporaneous Berlin Airlift look small by comparison. Can we imagine six million murdered Jews if Israel had been in existence fifteen years earlier? Perhaps many- certainly still far too many- but that is why, despite its numerous problems, difficulties, and often injustices, a Jewish national homeland called Israel is the ultimate yad v'shem.

"And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name that shall not be cut off."