Arab Culture Night

On this gala occasion, students heard the Muslim Call to Prayer performed in person by the official muezzin father and son team from the Al Aksa Mosque, then enjoyed a banquet representing the feat at the end of Ramadan, and to top it all off, they learned Palestinian dances from local instructors. 

The Oasis cafeteria got some extra trimmings for the feast.

 Mr. Ayman Jebara, the Arabic teacher, narrated and translated for the Call to Prayer presentation in the Forum.

 Students were invited to dress in the styles they see in the old city and East Jerusalem.

The student committee decorated one elaborate corner especially for group photos.

Curious about the menu?  We feasted on:

Dilaع Kharuf (Lamb )

Musakhan (Sumac Chicken, wrapped in thin wheat pitas)

Sfihah (meat pies)

Maklube (upside down casserole)

Saniyye (potato, onion, tahini)

Kusa (zucchini, stuffed)

Bagdunsiya (tahini with parsley)

Babaganoush (eggplant)

Tabbouleh (bulgar salad)

Kubbeh (bulgur dumplings stuffed with meat)

Kunafa (cheese pastry)

 Some of our wonderful service couples got into the costumes as well.

The Palestinian dance instructors arrived in time for the sweet Kunafa.  Andrew was practicing his Arabic and welcoming our guests.

The Imams ate and left early; here you can see the rest of the head table: Ayman Jebara, Kent Jackson, Eran Hayet, Tawfic Alawi, Nancy Jackson, and Andrew.

Hezekiah's Tunnel

 The City of David and Hezekiah's Tunnel is always a favorite field trip.  Besides the obvious awesomeness of walking through 12 inches of water for 30-45 minutes wearing a headlamp, hanging out with students while singing "As I Went Down to the River to Pray," besides all that, we also go back in time to structures built in the time of Jeremian, Lehi, King David, the previous Jebusite inhabitants, Abraham, and Melchizedek.      But here's what you want to see, pictures of cute kids doing fun things.

 Here is Carrie with her buddies, Rachel and Rachel.

 Lisa was tunnel buddies with Kaylen

Emily gets a lift from Will.  Notice the water came up to the lower edge of her shorts.

 Carrie made it out of the tunnel!

Seder

Although Passover (Pesach) is a spring holiday, we hold a simulated Seder each semester, hosted by Ophir Yarden.  We follow the Hagaddah, the book compiled in the Talmudic time period which describes the order of the ceremony.  "Seder" means order, and it includes all the steps from the first blessing on the day to the conclusion where we say, "Next Year in Jerusalem."  

The students worked together to arrange the room for a great feast, to make it different from an everyday meal.  Below you can see the Haggadah book, the two thin candles on the silver candlesticks which were lit before the ceremony (thanks to one of the cafeteria workers who lent me his lighter), and a goblet for Elijah. Ophir said they don't actually set a place for Elijah. They have a cup for Elijah, and they open the door and see if he is there, but setting an extra place represents welcoming the stranger or unexpected guest.

Some students even helped make the Charoset (that's "ch" like in Bach), which represents the mortar with which the enslaved Children of Israel were forced to build.  Ashkenazi Jews (of European descent) typically make charoset with apples, cinnamon, walnuts, and wine/grape juice).  But Sephardi Jews (of middle eastern and North African descent) make Charoset with dates, walnuts, and wine. 

 
Our Seder host Ophir recommended the Ashkenazi recipe, but our Palestinian chef Achmed, well seasoned at catering Seder events in Egypt and Jordan, he recommended using rich, chocolate-brown date paste. So we compromised. The students cut apples, chopped walnuts, added cinnamon and grape juice, then kneaded in the date paste by hand. It was delicious! 

The charoset is placed on a Seder plate, along with parsley, a roasted hardboiled egg, a piece of roasted chicken, bitter herbs (we used commercially prepared red horseradish tempered with beets-not bad!), and romain lettuce.  Each table has a dish of salt water for dipping the parsley.  These symbols remind the participants of the bitterness of the slavery and the lambs that were sacrificed for the Paschal meal to save the firstborn of the children of Israel.

 

 

 

The delicious meal has to wait until the prescribed part of the evening, about an hour into the three-hour service.  First come prayers of thankfulness, cups of wine (we used grape juice), and reading the story of the Exodus.  Everything is participatory, as we take turns reading, dipping the parsley, making a sandwich with charoset, bitter herbs, and matzah. The students prepared songs in Hebrew and sang throughout the service.

Before eating, everyone washes their hands with a two-handled cup like those found in the washing stations of the Western Wall. They can also be found in restrooms and restaurants. This is a ritual cleansing of the hands. 

 


The leader gets his own hand washing bowl and a special packet containing three matzah.  The middle matzah is broken, and a piece of it gets hidden away.  That piece is called the afikomen, and it somehow gets lost and must be found, then redeemed at the end of the evening.  The children and students go look for the afikomen, and whoever finds it trades it for a treat, and the afikomen is eaten as the last bite of the supper.  It would have been this piece of bread which the Savior blessed and broke at the Last Supper. 

Our host sat at a head table with his daughter Yemima, and the students who helped read passages from the Haggadah. 

Ashkenazi Haroset Recipe (Yield: 3 cups)
6 peeled apples, coarsely chopped
2/3 c chopped almonds or walnuts
3 tbsp sugar, or to taste
½ tsp cinnamon
grated rind of 1 lemon
4 tbsp grape juice
Combine all, mixing thoroughly. Add juice if needed. Blend to desired texture-some like it coarse and crunchy, others prefer it ground to a paste. Chill. (Optional: Add ground dates!)

Excursions: Walls, Museums, Domes

The Anglican School community includes Jewish, Muslim, and Christian teachers, and mostly Christian students with a few Muslim families.  Therefore, school began after Ramadan, is closed for Christmas and Easter, as well as all the Jewish holidays, and on the Muslim holidays, there is teacher inservice with the understanding that the Muslim teachers will be excused. October began with the week-long Jewish holiday of Sukkot, so accompanied by the Schades, we did the Ramparts Walk.  This takes us from Jaffa Gate, past Damascus Gate, then all the way to Lion's or St. Stephen's Gate.  If you've never been, imagine the city is a clock, and we walked clockwise from a position of 10:00 to 3:00.  (But it only took 2 hours).  Another tour goes from Jaffa Gate to Zion's Gate, counter clockwise from 10 to 7.

Carrie and Emily overlooking the housetops of the Christian Quarter and the distinctive triangle decor made of pottery cylinders.    

Behind Damascus Gate.

We left the wall briefly for lunch and a tour of Zedekiah's cave, an ancient quarry, said to be the source of First Temple stones in Solomon's day.  An 11th century legend says Zedekiah tried to flee from the city through this cave and emerged near Jericho.  There is no exit today, but the cavern extends 650 feet toward  the Garden Tomb.  One of the large caverns has held masonic meetings since its rediscovery in the 1860s.

 From high up on the wall again, we could see Golgotha, the small caves to the right of the big cave.  The top of the hill is a Muslim cemetery, and just behind the building with arched windows is a bus station.  It's easy to forget while standing near the peaceful Garden Tomb that the site is surrounded by  a busy metropolis.

The Ramparts Walk features uneven stones and endless steps.  Definitely not ADA approved.  I mean in terms of accessibility, not fluoride content.

Nearing the end of our tour, we could see our home, the BYU Jerusalem Center, in the distance.  Funny how we go out on excursions looking for new sites, but we're always eager to see what we're already familiar with from our new vantage point.

Speaking of vantage points,  we went to the Bloomfield Science Museum that same week.  Here are Emily and Linda and all their multiples.

If I try to rotate this photo now, I'm afraid blogger will freeze on my again, so my apologies.  This is an exercise in pulleys and patience.  A small wooden ball sits in the circular hole in the square block, and you raise it to the oval on tope while trying to avoid all the polka dots.  Dad, I can go back with my measuring tape if you want dimensions.  We got a year's membership.

This photo's for my dad, also.  He's a big fan David Macauley's The Way Things Work, which inspired a room in the museum.

I call this the Wacky Wednesday room.  The kids loved watching themselves in the monitor where they could see themselves climbing the walls.

This optical illusion is in the courtyard where we ate lunch.  Watch Emily go from Goliath-sized...

...to David sized.

This isn't an excursion, but here you see our first pita-making experiment.  Click here for the recipe.

The dough puffs up in the oven, then collapses to form a pocket.  If we didn't have such wonderful fresh pita available, my kids would have thought the homemade was pretty good.  I'll try the recipe again next year.

Another day took us to the Temple Mount or Haram Es-Sharif.  From the walkway we had a good view of the plaza.

Here you see a young man's Bar Mitzvah on one side of the wall, while moms and aunties hold up cameras from across the partition.

This is the back side of the eastern Golden Gate, built in the 6th or 7th century on the remains of a lower, older gate, and sealed by the Ottomans in the 16th century.

This view of the Dome framed by a washing station is captured in one of my favorite George Kosinsky paintings.  Muslims wash before prayer, with the intent to be clean but also to be obedient and in the right frame of mind.  An ornate well on the way to the Dome of the Rock provides for foot washing as well as hands, and face.  I hope to write soon about the Seder and include photos of the two-handled cups used by Jews for ritual cleaning before ceremonies and meals.

The size of this shrine is hard to capture.  This is a photo of Karla Schade and Candice Stratford, with Joe as the happy camper in the backpack.  We felt grateful to be up on the Temple Mount/Haram Es-Sharif because as we exited the city an hour later, the entrance was closed.

Walking through the Muslim Quarter, we saw several homes whose bright decorations proclaimed their owner's completion of the Hajj to Mecca.  Our friend and custodian Mr. Zehikka took off work for a month to go to Saudi Arabia, and we expect him back soon. In addition to circling the Qa'aba, many Muslims purchase a lamb whose meat is given to the poor.  A fast day proceeds the feast of Eid el-Adha (October 26th this year), and gifts or cash are given to children.

This mural in the Jewish Quarter depicts the colonnaded Cardo which ran through the city in Roman times.  This was part of Emperor Hadrian's plan to Romanize Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina in the 2nd century A.D. and erase the city as a Jewish icon and center of rebellion.

When the Jewish Quarter was being rebuilt in the 20th century, residences and stores were built in such a way that archaeologists could work below, and so the old is preserved beneath the new.  The Madaba map in Jordan helped with the effort of locating the remains of the cardo.  If you know where to look, you can see a second, smaller colonnaded cardo, which intersects the other on the left (north) side of the picture.  Both paths are still extant in the city today.  

 Some columns remain or have been reconstructed.  This quiet street is 30 feet below a modern thoroughfare where shoppers peruse arched shops for silver jewelry and high-end artwork.

So that's October in a nutshell, new places and old places.

Sukkot

Sukkot was September 30-October 7.  As we drove around that week, we saw these square structures replacing or next to the usual cafe tables and sun umbrellas next to restaurants and apartment buildings. 

Ophir Yarden says you can divide the Jewish holidays into roughly two camps. Many holidays can be simplified thus: "God is Great! Let's eat."  Others can be summarized by, "They tried to destroy us, they didn't succeed, God is great!  Let's eat."   Passover, Sukkot, Purim, and Hanukah fall into this category, commemmorating respectively the Exodus, forty-year trek in the wilderness, survival during Persian oppression, and Maccabean revolt. 

Sukkot means tabernacles or booths.  The sukkah has to be outdoors, because it commemorates the children of Israel living in temporary structures in the wilderness, vulnerable to the elements and therefore relying on the protection of the Lord. The idea is humility through relinquishing material comforts (think YW Camp), and also confidence in the providence of the Lord as demonstrated by his watchcare over the wandering Israelites. 

 The sukkah roof has to be made of plant material, and we saw palm branches or reed mats. It has to be permeable to rain and give the occupant the ability to see a few bright stars through the cracks of the roof. The roof goes on last and comes off first. The supports are supposed to be strong enough to keep the sukkah standing in a light wind, but not permanent enough to withstand a huge gale.

 There must be 2 1/2 sides, but it doesn't matter what the sides are made of. We saw fabric, tent material, and even plastic printed with the name of the nearby restaurant.

 Large apartment buildings usually have communal sukkot near the entrances, as do synagogues, but people put them on balconies as well. We saw garlands of flowers or strings of lights decorating the fanciest sukkot.

The idea is to live in them for a week, which for most people means eating and socializing, so most people eat at least some meals in the sukkah. Many people host family and friends in their sukkah on the eve, first day, or last day of Sukkot. 

 
The sukkot near restaurants allow the more observant Jews to eat all their meals in a sukkah for the week if they wish.

 

 In addition to building and dwelling in sukkot, the children of Israel were also commanded to wave four species of plants to the four corners of the world and beat then beat them on the ground.  This lively commemoration occurs in synagogues or by the Western Wall.  If you're curious to learn more about Sukkot, click here.