Feminist Protest at the Western Wall

On Friday morning I went with Katie, a friend from Hebrew class, to the Western Wall for a service at 7:00am given by a group called "Women of the Wall".  This is a group of feminist Orthodox Jewish women that believe that women should have equal rights as the men at the Western Wall.  

For a little bit of background, the Western Wall aka the Wailing Wall is a section of the original wall that went around the Temple Mount back in the Second Temple Period (Herod's temple, the temple during the time of Christ). Jews regard the Western Wall as holy and they gather in front of the wall to pray and worship.  The Western Wall is divided into two sections, one for men and one for females. The men are allowed to wear prayer shawls, hold worship services, read from the Torah, and sing and dance, while the women are not.  The "Women of the Wall" are a group that protests these unequal rights, and once a month they gather at the Wall on Friday at 7:00am to hold a worship service in the back of the women's section. 

Katie and I showed up early Friday morning and joined their service.  There was a group of about 50 women, reading the service from the Hebrew prayer book and singing together, most of them wearing prayer shawls.  Many of them were American born Israelis, and it was a wide variety of ages, anywhere from late teens to older women.  At one point in the service, I noticed an Israeli soldier with a little camcorder, filming us, and I turned to Katie and asked her why. She told me, "Well... this group has been known to get a little riotous in the past...". Oh the adventures I get myself into sometimes!  But everything stayed calm and proceeded smoothly and when we finished the service, we moved outside the area of the Wall down into the archeological park for the reading of the Torah and a lot of men in support of the group joined us.

This was such an interesting event to participate in, once again mostly for the people we were able to meet and talk to, particularly one girl who helped us to understand what was going on and where we currently were in the Hebrew prayer book.  I may go back again!

Videos I took of the group:

Singing as we walk away from the Wall

Reading of the Torah. Note how she passes it around and people kiss it. Also note how there are men present as well.

May 11, 2013 Update:
Yesterday there was an article in the NY Times about this group I participated with! This is a piece of the article:
"JERUSALEM — Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews tried to block a liberal women’s group from praying at the Western Wall on Friday morning, creating a tense standoff in the latest flash point of a broader battle over religion and identity that has engulfed Israel.
Heeding calls from their rabbis, religious teenage girls turned up in large numbers to protest the group’s insistence on praying at the wall in religious garb traditionally worn by men. The girls crammed the women’s section directly in front of the wall by 6:30 a.m., forcing the liberal women to conduct their prayer service farther back on the plaza. There, hundreds of police officers locked arms in cordons to hold back throngs of black-hatted Orthodox men who whistled, catcalled, and threw water, candy and a few plastic chairs."

Ulpan

I am currently taking a break from working in the lab to do a Hebrew Ulpan; aka an intensive modern Hebrew course.  Sunday to Thursday, I attend class for 5 hours and it lasts for one month, until the end of July.  We have two female Israeli teachers who switch off days and teach only in Hebrew, along with a textbook that also uses very little English.  The best part of Ulpan is most certainly the people in the class; people I have grown to love in just a few short weeks.  Our class is about 20 people, half of them American and the other half from all around the world including Germany, Norway, Finland, France, Korea, Italy (yay),Holland, South Africa and Canada.  

Each day we get to know each other during our class breaks and working in groups and activities we plan for after class.  We all come from very different backgrounds and yet get along so well.  Just over half the class is Christian, the rest are Jewish, many are studying Hebrew with the intent of pursuing some kind of studies in the Bible and Biblical Hebrew. Some of the interesting people I am friends with are a fellow LDS student with a degree in religious studies and Archeology who is headed off the BYU law school, a 32-year old Lutheran minister here with his wife and three kids, a "Hebrew Roots" Christian who wears the kippa and ropes hanging from his pants, eats kosher and observes Jewish holidays, currently in seminary with the long-term goal of teaching the Old Testament, a 21-year old very normal American kid studying international relations who just happens to speak Arabic fluently and be a clergy member of the Greek Orthodox Church, and many more.  Several of us watch movies, go shopping, explore tourist sites, and have a weekly Bible study together, conducted by the Lutheran minister.  Each person has their own story and their own unique reasons for spending a month in Israel learning Hebrew, and I am convinced that the main reason I am studying Hebrew in this Ulpan right now is for the opportunity to associate with these great people.

Italy... Again!

Two weeks ago I went to Italy for 6 days! It was a transition period from working in the lab to doing Hebrew Ulpan, and I had a few free days over the weekend. So I decided to go to Italy with Joseph and his sister Anna, and Josh, the 17-year old son of a religion professor at the BYU Jerusalem Center.

Because I knew Italy so well and knew people that we could stay with (and also because I was the oldest of our little group of 4), I was in charge of planning the whole trip.  For 6 days, we ran around Rome, Naples, and Florence and had an incredible adventure with our rental car and sleeping on floors, beds, and in cars.  

I will just share some of the highlights and pictures.

Josh and I go to the airport on Thursday (Joseph and Anna arrived earlier in the day) and we are picked up by some members of the Ostia ward, David, Riccardo, Marco. Oh how wonderful it was to see these people again, the YSA of the Ostia ward!  I love them so much, and as I talked to David before coming to Italy, he touched my heart by telling me that the members of the Ostia ward would be willing to help me in anyway because they were grateful for my service to the ward, it was their way of repaying me.  It brought tears to my eyes, and to see them again and their willingness to help me and my friends was so special! Especially because Riccardo was an investigator in Ostia, found when I was serving there a year ago, and now he is a baptized, strong member of the church! What sweet memories those are.

On Friday morning we went to the airport to pick up a rental car we had reserved.  There were some misunderstandings and I animatedly argued with the rental car person in Italian, surprisingly bringing back even more sweet memories and a passionate side of me that only the beautiful Italian people and Italian language can bring out, haha.  I honestly love the freedom I feel speaking in Italian to express exactly how I feel in exactly the way that I feel it.

After the car fiasco and an extra 150 dollars, we toured around Rome and left that night to go to Napoli, a city in my mission but one I had never been to.  We had plans to stay the night with Marco, a talented Italian studying at NYU who I had met on the plane just a month before.  He had an incredible apartment, in what was probably one of the richest parts of town, penthouse with a balcony and a view of all of Naples, the ocean, and Mount Vesuvius.  It was absolutely incredible, and to top it off we bought 5 Margherita pizzas and ate them on the balcony with the amazing view. That was definitely a highlight of the trip, a once in a lifetime experience.

On Saturday we went to Pompeii and it was hot. Then we drove to Positano.  Positano is a beautiful beach town just south of Naples on the Amalfi Coast. I had heard about how great it was from my mission companion Sorella Olsen, and it was one of my "must sees" next time in Italy.  The drive there was spectacular, a narrow winding road through steep cliffs that dropped down to the ocean and they somehow built a colorful little town on the side of these cliffs. 

Positano

Pompeii

Trevi Fountain

Saturday night was spent at Dima Scotchi's (a missionary I served with) on his floor, and on Sunday morning we went church hopping! Thanks to the rental car, we were able to go to Ladispoli for the first hour and Ostia for sacrament meeting and I saw so many people that I love so much!  Even better, in each ward I had an old companion currently serving there (Sorella Buma in Ladispoli and Sorella Olsen in Ostia).  Ladispoli was great, but being back in Ostia especially with Sorella Olsen, was a dream.  We were a few minutes late and I snuck in and sat by Angela, my Ukranian miracle baptism.  She had no idea I was going to be there, and was so happy to see me!  We stayed around church for an hour after it ended just so I could talk to everyone in the ward and I couldn't have been happier. Ostia was my favorite area, my favorite ward with my favorite people.  

In the afternoon we went to see the temple grounds. We had to see it from the top story of the building next door because the grounds are closed off, but it was crazy to see how much work they had done since last time I saw it!  9 months ago there was just a hole in the ground, and now there are 4 tall buildings under construction, the temple, church, hostel, and visitor's center. 

We toured around Rome a bit more, ate pizza in front of the Colosseum at night, and began our drive to Florence.  We couldn't find a decently priced place to sleep that night, so in the early hours of the morning, we pulled over at a random rest stop  in between Rome and Florence and slept in the car.  I couldn't sleep at all in the car, so I actually sat at the top steps of a closed cafe and watched the sun rise over Tuscany and listened to music.  Even though I was absolutely exhausted, it was one of the coolest experiences for me to find a little bit of alone time and reflect on things during the Tuscan sunrise.  

On Monday we toured around Florence and climbed to the top of the Duomo.  We made it back to our hotel just as the sun was setting. Our hotel was about a 25 minute bus ride from the heart of Florence, on top of a hill just about a little town, and it had a spectacular view! 

Duomo in Florence

View from the top of the Duomo in Florence

Ponte Vecchio in Florence

 

San Gimignano

San Gimignano from the top of a tower

San Gimignano

On Tuesday we toured other Tuscan towns including San Gimignano, a beautiful town on top of a hill with lots of towers.  That night Anna and Josh went into Florence to try to see Michaelangelo's David, and Joseph and I drove around trying to find a certain monastery. We weren't able to find it but ended up in a piazza with a spectacular view of Florence, and then got kebabs!

Wednesday we went to Siena and then I was dropped off at the airport, where I was flagged for being very suspicious (my passport picture looks nothing like me and I technically don't have a visa yet for Israel...) After intense questioning and an hour later, I made it on the plane but it was my fault that the flight was 20 minutes late! Oops!

Being in Italy was absolutely fantastic, made even better by Joseph, Anna, and Josh.  Every day we packed in so much, had a dozen mini-adventures, and memorable moments.  I want to just summarize what some of my favorite moments were:

1. Luca, my Romanian friend and investigator in Ostia, spent a day in Rome and came to Napoli, Pompeii, and Positano with us.  Hanging out with Luca was incredible, we all loved having him with us and he fit right in.  More than that, I was so impressed with him. Sorella Olsen and I found him on a train over a year ago, and although he isn't baptized, I am astounded to see how much he has changed. He is happy, he is so involved with all the other young adults of the Church, and is practically a member. Even more, I was so impressed with his maturity.  For any problem that came up or any question that needed answering, Luca was by my side, helping. He drove the car when we all were exhausted, helped navigate, and showed us great pizza places in Rome. It has been a long time since I have been "his missionary", but I still feel that missionary-like love and concern for him, and it made me so happy to see him doing so well.  

2. Food!

Pizza on the balcony in Napoli

Pizza at night in front of the Colosseum

Every town we went to, we stopped for gelato. So good!

Sandwiches in the pinetta on Sunday in Ostia. The same pinetta where we taught so many people, so many memories, we ate fresh bread with fresh mozzarella cheese and meat.  So simple and yet so good!

One of our many gelato stops

Pizza being made in Napoli

Eating pizza on the balcony in Napoli with Marco

3. Seeing all the people in the Ostia ward again. It was such a sweet reunion

Ostia!

4. Sunrises and sunsets in Tuscany, watching the sunrise on the balcony in Napoli.

sunrise over Tuscany at the truck rest stop. Everyone else was asleep in the car, hidden behind the trucks in the picture

View from our hotel room in Tuscany

Sunset over Florence

5. Spending hours driving around, lost, either in Rome or Florence or Napoli or on our way to some other place.  So many one way streets!  So many roads we drove on that were illegal for non-residents! Oops!

6. Adventures like jumping over the fence to sneak into the building by the temple grounds and scaring the only two people in the building. Or jumping the wall at Pompeii to run around the top of the ampitheater

7. Views of the cities from the tops of church duomos and towers

8. Not being able to express myself clearly in English and having to switch to Italian to more quickly give directions to Luca. Ahhh, Italian :)

9. Laughing fits over nothing because we were functioning on just a few hours of sleep each night

10. Being stung by a jellyfish at Positano! 3 weeks later and I still have the marks...

jellyfish sting!

Bethlehem

Sorry, this is crummy writing, but I am just scrambling to write down experiences without any thought for style because there are so many great experiences and so little time to record them!

I went to Bethlehem with George after Ulpan class. George is a 21 year old kid from Ohio/Virginia/Texas (?), very quiet and nice.  After class we stopped by his apartment to drop off our stuff and his roommates told me that it was his birthday!  It was someone else’s birthday in our class too and George didn’t speak up at all!  We went to Damascus Gate and took the Arab bus 21 to Bethlehem where we then got off and walked 15 minutes to the Church of the Nativity.  George speaks Arabic fluently too, which was extremely helpful because we really had no idea where we were going.  We found a falafel shop that sold falafels for 4 shekels, an incredible deal, and George had his first falafel in Israel.  I started taking a video and the guy working started yelling at me and  I got scared and shut off the video camera. It turns out that he just wanted to know if we were going to post it on youtube because he wanted to be on youtube, haha.  We continued on to the church and as we stood outside of it, George pulled out a long black robe from his bag.  I asked him, “what is that?” and he said, “well, I am actually a lower level clergy for the Greek Orthodox church”.  What!!!  Haha, coolest thing ever.  He put on his long black robe (called a cassock), and we entered.  It also turns out that the Church of the Nativity was a Greek Orthodox church so George was able to tell me all about the things inside the church and Orthodox beliefs.  So freaking cool.  We talked about icons and how they act as symbols to help us picture who we are worshipping and we kiss them just as we would kiss a picture of someone we love who is far away. He told me about the liturgy and the two alternating choirs in Orthodox churches, and the lampada that represent prayers ascending to heaven. We talked briefly about differences in beliefs, that the Orthodox believe in a continuous line of authority and they can trace their authority back to the apostles, and the Orthodox church is run by a council system, with one kind of head patriarch.  The break between the Catholics and the Orthodox was because the Catholics tried to make the one head patriarch infallible (the Pope).  The Orthodox believe the Catholic church is in heresy. 

When we got to the spot of Jesus’s birth, George made the sign of the cross several times and bowed down and kissed the ground in front of it.  I asked him later if he believed that the sites like Church of the Holy Sepulcher were accurate and if it mattered to him. He said yes, he believed them to be the true sites because they date so far back, and he said it in kind of a matter of fact way, as if it was “well of course those are the real sites”.  He told me that he was “set apart” as a subdeacon when he was 16 and he will be a subdeacon for life.  He thought he was too young, but he wasn’t ordained, so he could marry and do other things. It was a type of lower clergy.  He also talked about how the church was set up like the ancient temples with a curtain and a sort of holy of holies (where the sacrament was prepared), and how church design was patterned after heavenly worship.  I of course could say very little about our beliefs because we are in Israel (oh curse this rule sometimes!). It was very interesting though and I thought it incredible to have my friend be Orthodox clergy and share the experience of the Church of the Nativity with him.  I later told him a mormon joke pickup line about holding the priesthood, and he didn’t think it very funny, haha.  Bummer. I suppose Orthodox humor and Mormon humor is a little bit different. 

We then tried to go to Shepherd’s field (George talked to a police man to help us not get ripped off by the taxi driver) and for 15 shekels we got there to find out that it closes at 5.30, right when we arrived. The dumb taxi driver would have known this.. But we talked to the olive wood store owner Linda, and then took a taxi back. We then went to a restaurant and ordered Kanefe, a sweet cheesy honey Arab treat, and I tried really hard to get the restaurant workers to sing to him, which embarrassed him a lot. They didn’t sing, but came and shook his hand, and thought I was really funny.  George told me as we walked out that they loved me and were calling me all sorts of pet names.  I really do love Palestinian culture, they are so much more open and friendly and loving and generous than the Israelis, although I love them too.  

4 Shekel falafel

Church of the Nativity (where Christ was born according to tradition)

George wearing his cassock

line to get to the spot where Jesus was born

The holy spot where Jesus was born, kissed and revered by many

Kanefe

Delicious mix of cheese and honey and goodness

My Birthday

My birthday in Israel was out of the ordinary and yet the perfect example of what defines my life right now: random experiences, sometimes frustrating and usually culminating in some amazing experience that makes me step back, shake my head, and think “I actually am living in Jerusalem right now. Crazy”.

Midnight struck and I was on a plane from Rome to Israel. The man sitting next to me was a particularly friendly Israeli man, probably in his 40’s but he invited me to come visit him in northern Israel, haha.  Passport control in the airport was a bit of a pain, they let me through but I was severely reprimanded for not having my student visa yet.

Tel Aviv is about an hour away from Jerusalem, and the best way to get from the airport to home is a “sherut”; a shared taxi van that fits about 15 people. The sherut doesn’t leave from the airport until it is full with 15 people, and at 1:00 am it takes a long time to fill! So I waited an hour to leave and then another hour to get home.  At 3.15am, the sherut pulled up to the house where I was dogsitting, dropped me off, and then I discovered that the person who was supposed to spend the night at the house changed her mind and slept at her own apartment! I was locked outside the house with no keys and no way to get in, in the middle of the night on my birthday!  What a terrible morning!

            I called my friend with the keys and thankfully she was willing to drive to the house and open the door for me.  I slept for 3 hours and woke up to go to my first day of Hebrew Ulpan; a Hebrew intensive course that goes for 5 hours a day, Sun-Thurs, for just over a month.  I actually missed the first two days of Ulpan to be in Italy, and so I arrived on the first day having missed about 10 hours of class instruction.  The class is about 20 people, half of them American and half from other parts of the world, and the teacher is an Israeli woman who teaches in only Hebrew.  Complete immersion, no English!

            Needless to say, I understood very little of what was going on and I was shocked to discover that the entire class could read and write Hebrew, and they seemed to be far ahead of where I was! I figured that I already knew the alphabet and a few words, thus missing the first few days of Hebrew class would have been no problem.  Wrong!  So here I am, sitting in class on my birthday with 3 hours of sleep, having no idea what is going on; and this went on for 5 hours!  During one of my breaks, I started talking to a guy in my Ulpan class. He asked where I was from and I told him Utah.  He got a little smile on his face and said, “I am going to BYU law school in the fall.  I knew you were Mormon as soon as you walked in!”  His name is James, he is just here for Hebrew Ulpan for a month with his wife and then starts school at BYU.  I told him it was my birthday and he invited me to have dinner with him and his wife.  I was so grateful because I had no plans for the day and I was really hoping to be able to celebrate my birthday somehow; it was a turnaround in my not-so-good day. 

            So that night I had dinner with James and Kindra, one of the most amazing couples I have ever met.  I admire them so much! They have been married just a year, James is my age, and this is their second summer they have spent in Israel together.  They just finished doing an archaeological dig in Northern Israel for a month; they go on crazy adventures and you can tell that they get along so well.  They are both very smart and incredibly talented and personable and funny and strong in the gospel. They are a power couple!  I had a blast eating dinner, playing card games, and finishing off the evening with Magnum ice cream bars (my favorite!).

            To complete the Israeli birthday experience, as I was waiting for a bus home, I was approached by a young Israeli man.  He first started talking to me by asking for money.  When I told him I was a poor student, he sat down next to me and in very broken English changed the conversation to asking how old I was and if we could go out sometime. Hahaha. And this is why it was such an unusual birthday and yet such a typical day in Jerusalem.  I went home exhausted but happy.