Sukkot: the greatest hits

My parents recently came for a good, long visit (two and a half weeks) which coincided with the school holiday for Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles.  They stayed with me for the first week (my housemate Allison was, fortunately for them, away – hello, free lodging) then we hired a car and drove up to Zichron Yaakov in the north-west for a few days.  I had to come back for school (bah) so they stayed up north then returned to Jerusalem for a final weekend before heading back to the UK.  Naturally we did a lot of sightseeing, certainly more than I’ve managed alone and we covered a lot of ground.  Rather than an exhaustive narrative of their sojourn I thought I’d present you with an edited version of the highlights.  Sukkot: the Greatest Hits, if you will.

1.  A day out in Akko. Akko was formerly Acre, the main port and capital of the Latinate Kingdom of Palestine and the sight of a major Crusader fort and hospital run by the Knights Hospitaller.  The main reason one visits Akko now is to wander the streets and buildings of the Old City (which is predominantly Arab).  There’s a lot of history in the place so naturally my parents and I loved it – they’re big on Crusader history and I, as we all know, am a massive history geek.  We spent a very pleasant day visiting the Crusader fort, the underground tunnels, the Turkish bath-houses and the Al-Jazzar mosque.  For me though, the highlight was eating a fantastic lunch at the Doniana restaurant with spectacular views over the city walls and the Mediterranean, watching a group of Arab boys jumping off the walls into the water despite being told off (regularly) by the police boat that was motoring around.  I’d have joined in if I could.

How much fun does this look?

[The other highlight was watching my mum deal with the very rude woman in the Turkish bathhouses, who basically told us to get lost when we showed up a whopping 2 minutes late for the guided tour.]

2. Mooching round the Christian Quarter in the Old City.  We wanted to visit the Dome of the Rock and Temple Mount, for which one has to arrive at the right time and queue for ages, but missed the time slot so we ended up instead drinking coffee and watching the world go by in the Muristan, a little labyrinth of unnamed streets close to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  From there we headed up the tower of the Lutheran Church for some spectacular views over the Old City, then fought our way through the hordes at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  It’s a funny place – the church is shared by 6 different denominations and is a blend of the mystical, the sacred and (in my opinion) the ridiculously touristy.  There was no way of getting into the Holy Sepulchre itself (the tomb of Christ) without queuing for ages, so we skipped that and sat in the Katholikon for a while, the Greek Orthodox section, which was quieter and so enabled one to sit in contemplation for a while, rather than being forced to listen to one of the many loud tour guides elsewhere.

Bowing before the icons – very Greek.  That’s my mum on the left with the camera.

I think my favourite place inside the Church (which I intend to revisit, there’s so much to see) was the walls leading down to the Chapel on St. Helena on which medieval pilgrims had scratched Jerusalem crosses.  There’s something very profound about being in the place where people have been worshipping and making pilgrimage for hundreds of years.  It was a damn sight harder to get there in the Middle Ages, too.

3. Visiting the headquarters of Grindlays Bank, formerly the Ottoman Bank.  My dad spent most of his professional life working for Grindlays Bank, one of the old British colonial banks founded in 1828, later ANZ Grindlays Bank.  In the 1960s (I think) the Ottoman Bank, founded in 1856, sold many of its Middle East holdings to Grindlays, who then operated banks in both the West Bank and in Israel – very unusual for any bank given the nature of Arab-Israeli relations.  This is a very round-about way of saying that my dad wanted to visit the bank’s old headquarters in East Jerusalem, on the corner of Salah-al Din and Sultan Suleiman Street, by the Herod Gate.  So we did.  We didn’t find the headquarters as they’re no longer in use but Dad did talk to various stall-holders in the streets around (using his rusty Arabic from his days in the Gulf) and it’s always fun to go to East Jerusalem, which is Arab and so much more like the Middle East as I know it from my childhood.  Much as Mum and I made fun of the whole procedure, it was rather special to be part of Dad’s little pilgrimage.

4. Shabbat dinner at Naomi’s.  One of my friends from the Anglican, Naomi, invited me and my parents to Shabbat dinner at hers during Sukkot, giving us the opportunity to eat inside her sukkah and take part of a traditional Jewish Shabbat evening.  The sukkah are temporary structures, usually made from plywood (or so it seems to me) and covered with palm leaves, so that you can still see the stars.  During Sukkot the Jews remember the years of dwelling in the desert and give thanks to YHWH for the harvest.  They are everywhere on the streets of Jerusalem and, in what I think is a curious irony, are often decorated with Christmas decorations imported from the States or Britain.  Naomi is a terrific cook so we ate a fantastic dinner with her and her friends, listened to the sound of singing coming from the many sukkah around us and sang some songs of our own.  Actually, at that point things got a little surreal – after singing traditional Jewish hymns, we moved on to ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Amazing Grace’, which seemed a little out of context when taking part in a traditional Jewish festival…

Shabbat dinner at Naomi’s.  See the Christmas decorations in the top-left corner?

5. The Baha’i Gardens, Haifa.  The Baha’i religion is one of the world’s newest and in Haifa, on the north-west coast, you can find the famous and beautiful Baha’i Gardens which contain the Shrine of the Bab, one of the two holiest sites in Baha’ism.  They really are beautiful, stretching down the sides of a steep hill down to Ben Gurion Street in Haifa’s German Colony and overlooking the Mediterranean.  They are immaculately preserved, full of beautiful plants (frangipane trees, my favourite) and statues and well-trimmed verges which, disappointingly, you cannot walk on as you are confined to one over-crowded central walkway.

The Shrine of the Bab and its thousands of visits rammed onto the central path.

I loved the Baha’i Gardens but that’s not why they make the Greatest Hits.  In one of those events that only seems funny afterwards, we had a huge row about the right way to get there, having abandoned our car on a street somewhere after finding what was apparently the only shop still open in Haifa on a Friday afternoon (stupid Shabbat early closing time).  The trouble with my family is that we all think we’re right and so no one is willing to back down or listen to someone else’s viewpoint.  The cab driver who drove us there didn’t help matters either and so by the time we finally got into the gardens we were all in the midst of our own individual strops.  Somehow tranquillity slowly returned to the Brunskill family and by the time we reached the German Colony we were on speaking terms again.  In retrospect, the afternoon was a microcosm of 30 years (and in my parents’ case, longer) of conflict and resolution.  I love my family.

Obviously, in two and a half weeks we covered a lot more ground than this: a very long walk up the Mount of Olives;  Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial museum, of which more another time); the Western Wall and the south-west ramparts; the Roman ruins at Caesarea; Zichron Yaakov; dinner at the home of Goldie, one of my dad’s friends, in Haifa; a visit to the Museum of Israel.  But in the interests of time and the patience of my good readers, I shall leave my recollections here and hope these Greatest Hits give you a flavour of a rather splendid holiday.