Passover Seder

Boker Tov!

(good morning--Hebrew)!

So last week we had a simulated Passover Seder. Passover is still a few weeks away, but as our semester is ending next week (we have finals next week, and then we spend the rest of the time here studying the New Testament and the life of Jesus Christ), and I assume it is more convenient for our professor Ophir to be able to spend passover with his family rather than us, we had passover this past week. ;-) We did everything according to tradition though, and it was really a neat experience! 

"Seder" means "order" so the Passover Seder is a ceremony where everything has a particular order to it. 

Our table :-) 

We all had name cards and we all dressed nicely for dinner.

Ophir, our professor who teaches the Judaism/Israel class, led the whole event :-)

Me, Jessica, Sarah, and Tye

This book is the order of events and also contains all the scriptures and songs and things to be done at passover. 

Ophir leading the first toast (we all drank grape juice)

putting our herbs in salt water to symbolize the tears of the Israelites in Egypt.

This is the general setup of the room :-)

Ophir's daughter Yamima (the Hebrew name for Jemima) helped out by doing the children's parts of the ceremony. (and his kids are SO CUTE!)

Groups of students practiced songs to sing throughout the program 

another group of students narrated different parts of the program. (KC is pictured)

Sarah spilling drops of the grape juice (instead of wine) to symbolize the bittersweet result of Israelite freedom at the cost of the loss of Egyptian life.

Ophir and two of his kids. (he has four children, I met all four of them when we went to the Synagogue with his family a few weeks ago, but I don't have any pictures of our synagogue trip because we didn't take any out of respect for the Sabbath rules of the orthodox Jewish culture)

Jessica loving the matza ;-)

Tye making his Matza sandwich...

Matza, bitter herbs, and some sweet apple paste :-)

One passover tradition is the hiding of a piece of matza to be found at the end of dinner. The children all search for it. Ophir's four year old son, Betzalel, found it :-)

Such cute kids!

pouring the final glass of grape juice...

Lindee didn't like the grape juice so much...

love this.

I had such a great time! This was a really neat cultural experience!

At the end of the night, we broke the serious tone of the evening with a silly song. Ophir said that much of the passover is geared for little children to remain interested, and so it is tradition to end with a silly song. some of the kids in our group (Mikkel, Taylor, Kara, Chloe, and Tori) came up with this rap version of a passover song. It was to the tune of "Ice Ice Baby" and the video of them preforming it is really great ;-) (I can't post videos because our bandwidth here makes it really difficult to post large files.)

Seder was great!

-E

Elias Feinzilberg

Buenos Dias!

This post is a few weeks overdue, and I probably should have posted these photos when I posted about Yad Vashem, but oh well... A few weeks ago (mid-February) we had Elias Feinzilberg come speak to us. Each Wednesday night, we have a "forum speaker" come talk to us for about an hour. Each week there is a different local person who talks to us about current events and such. A few weeks ago, Elias came to speak to us and his story is incredible! He is a survivor of NINE concentration camps during the Holocaust. He told us his whole story from before the beginning of the war up until the liberation and afterwards. After the war, he moved to Guatemala for many years before he and his wife (also a holocaust survivor--he met her in a refugee camp after the end of the war) and children moved to the state of Israel. He doesn't speak English, so he spoke in Spanish and two students here that are fluent in Spanish translated for him. It was really an incredible experience! 

This is the only picture Elias has of his family. He is the one in the top row in the center. He was a young man when the war started, and he left his family (I believe they had just been moved to the Lodz ghetto in Poland) to do manual labor building a railroad for the Germans. He stayed alive through the war because of his ability to work hard. When he returned to find his family a few years later, he was told that his father (in the middle/right of the picture) had starved to death and the rest of his family had been sent to a concentration camp (I believe it was Auschwitz) where they were all murdered. His whole story is too long for me to even attempt recreating here, but it was really incredible to hear it and to get such a real historical perspective of the events we are studying. 

This is the number given to him at one of the camps (he ended up living in nine different concentration camps during the war including Auschwitz and Dachau). 

This is Elias Feinzilberg today. He is the cutest man! He is so happy and is such an inspiration to me. I don't think there was a dry eye in the room while he was talking, but afterwards (and during) we were all amazed by his current happy state. It was really neat! Also, his granddaughter and her husband were there and helped translate in a few parts, and it was really neat to see how life moves on, even when something so tragic and horrific happens.

This was truly an unforgettable experience. 

-E

Mount of Olives

Salutations from the Mount of Olives!

So the JC (the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies) is located on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. The other day, we had an afternoon without classes, so a group of us went to visit several of the churches that are near us on the Mount of Olives, as many of them are not open on Sundays (which is our free day).

Our first stop was the Russian Orthodox church of the Ascension, commemorating the ascension of Jesus Christ after he was resurrected. 

The sign entering the church area...

beautiful olive trees all over this country--and especially on the Mount of Olives ;-)

the tower in the background can be seen from all over

lovely.

outside the actual church...

KC and myself in front of the church :-)

Me and Jen inside the church

beautiful artwork :-)

We couldn't climb the tower, but it was fun to get up close... you can see this tower from anywhere in the city (and beyond).

the view from the church :-)

We then headed down the hill to some lower churches...

This was over a fence that was laced with barbed wire as we were walking down the hill... I thought the barbed wire made a cool picture...

sometimes I try to be artsy...

and again...

Our next stop was the church of Dominus Flevit, which I believe represents the tears of Jesus Christ when he was in the garden of Gethsemane (the church is shaped like a tear drop)...

the entrance sign...

Romeo and Me outside of the tear-shaped church of Dominus Flevit

The church...

Me and Jeff overlooking the city from Dominus Flevit

Sarah and Me--the church of Mary Magdalene (our next stop) is behind us

We then headed to the Church of Mary Magdalene, which is also Russian Orthodox...

Romeo and myself on the path leading up to the church

The church :-)

Spencer (left) and Mikkel, aka "Shoulders"(right) in front of the church

Me and Romeo 

Eden and Myself with the Dome of the Rock behind us

I just love this building...

Our group hanging out beneath the church...

:-)

A few of us then went into the city to exchange some money in preparation for our upcoming trip to Turkey, and we also stopped for lunch :-)

So Nikki is hilarious. She ate this really spicy hot pepper and in order to calm her mouth, she just held a piece of pita bread to her tongue to "soak up" the spice...

poor Nikki...

Spencer and I ate half a chicken... random?

Anne, Mitchell, and Nikki with their "burgers" (hamburger = meat of questionable origin inside a pita with some Arabic salad and a side of french fries)...

It was a great afternoon!

-E