Touring with our Group--Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv and the Tour
Wednesday: We said good bye to our apartment on Dizengoff Street, returned the rental car and GPS at Ben Gurion Airport, and prepared to join our tour. We returned to Tel Aviv via the train and the bus, making one final tourist stop at the Haganah Museum.
The Haganah Museum is not on most tourist agendas. It a single building located on Rothschild Street. The museum tells the story of the Israeli underground forces, a completely voluntary neighborhood watch, the predecessor of the current Israeli Defense Force. It has been a Jewish tradition for millennia to provide for its people, education, welfare, and security—even before Israel was a state. Jewish communities have always organized themselves, even when under hostile government regimes. The Haganah formed voluntarily to provide security, neighborhood watch if you will, for the settlements in Palestine. The Haganah, formed in 1920 because Palestine (before it was Israel) believed it was necessary to protect itself and to not count on the ruling British empire. These were volunteers who took an oath to join the Haganah out of personal conviction. They swore to remain faithful to this Jewish defense force for their lifetimes. When Israel became a state in 1948, the Haganah were already a significant force, albeit underground, with trained troops, organized command, weapons and munitions. When the Arab nations attacked Israel one day after the UN sanctioned the country, the Haganah was ready and was able to repel the Arabs, reforming Israel’s boundaries to include Jerusalem and the Negev.
The Haganah volunteers helped to resettle holocaust survivors, worked with the British against their enemies in WWII forming a Jewish brigade within the British Army. There they learned how to make rifles, copying the British weapons, and “acquired” machinery to manufacture their own bullets, all under the noses of their British commanders. The museum was a deeply inspiring reminder that Jews have always had to depend upon Jews, and still do.
We met our tour group, welcomed Joel and Susan to Israel—the organized tour had begun.
Thursday: Our first stop, after a 20 minute walk on the promenade, was to Old Jaffa. The group took a quick tour, learned about how a Tel is formed (centuries of accumulated debris from one city after another that is destroyed by war, fire, earthquake), took a panoramic view of Tel Aviv. We were glad we had visited in depth while we were traveling on our own.
Second stop took us out of Tel Aviv to a seldom visited site, the Ayalon. The Ayalon was a secret, underground munitions factory housed beneath a Kibbutz and operated under the noses of the British. We cannot begin to describe the pride we felt as we learned more about the Haganah and the amazing volunteers who spent 3 years underground making bullets for Israeli guns. In addition to what we learned about the Haganah, we understood that all Jews did not walk peacefully to their deaths. This very strong, committed group of Jews, were determined to be ready to defend themselves, and they did. When the Arab nations attacked the newly formed Israel, they were ready and supplied with the munitions they needed.
We went from the Ayalon to Tel Aviv University and the Museum of the Diaspora. This is the story of the Jewish people through the ages. The Diaspora dates from the time of the destruction of the second temple, 60 AD and continues until today for those not already living in Israel. In every country we have been wooed because we were educated, could read, write, and cipher. We could communicate across nations because we shared the common language of Hebrew. Over and over again, friendly nations invited us in, depended upon our educated skills, borrowed our money, and then threw us out, usually after killing many of us. And everywhere we went we built synagogues, in Turkey, in Spain, in Caracas, in Poland, moving ever Eastward. That is the history of our people, not the destruction, but the rising again and again, renewing ourselves, maintaining our sense of community, caring for one another, and the Torah. We need to remember that we are but a people of under 1% of the world population with more than 20% of the Noble prize winners, brilliant scholars in history, science, technology, medicine, poetry, literature, and more. This too short tour ended before any of us were sated, we all could have spent more time studying our people’s journey.
The day concluded with a wonderful dinner dance where we learned to dance Havanagilah—that is, all of us doing the same steps at the same time.