SUCCOT

Succot is pretty much the coolest holiday celbrated here. The Jews remember that the exodus into the wilderness and how their fathers had to stay in tabranacels that were mobile – they had no real home but that God protected them and provided for them. So – right now there are zillions of succots lining the street in Jerusalem. SO….. what do awesome 20 year olds in a cramped space do??? BUILD A SUCCOT! We made it out of mattresses and sheets. And then we watched Pride and Predjudice in it while we ate popcicles and bon-bons!!! It was AMAZING! (PS- please ignore that tiffany still has her mustache on J)

Mustaches!!

This is our revolt against the boys!!! They all decided to grow mustaches to be manly and we think they are disgusting so this is what we did to show them how ridiculous they really look! J

Monet for Mom!

MOM!!! Can you tell what puzzle we found at the center! It is the one of the Monet picture in our front room!!

Waiting outside of Yad Vashem with Stephen whose hat was keeping me out of the rain. J Yad Vashem is actually the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. It was a very hard experience but one that I really needed to go through and to learn from. The museum is made in the shape of a prism – with two triangle outlets on both sides of a long corridor. You can see the end from the beginning but you may not pass strait though. There are wires placed so that you must wind through the whole museum faze by faze and not miss anything. I learned a lot as we were guided through the museum. Some of the stories were about people that escaped- others of people who did not. One of a boy who was in a camp of 300,000. He was one of three that escaped and he was 13. At the very end of the museum was a room that was circular. On the top of the walls were pictures of those people affected by the Holocaust and beneath that were 3 or 4 rows of shelves. On these rows were black binders - each one filled with the name and information of all of the people the museum was about. There were empty spaces for the people that had no information on yet. I felt that history and their families were important to them.

Olive Press

Next we load the crushed olives into hemp bags (a very messy job) and those go in stacks of 5 under and olive press – we have two kinds at the Jerusalem Center: This one which presses like a cork screw and another that presses in a teater-totter action. Many times the first run of olive that comes out of the press runs red.

olive crushing technique

Like this! We just keep going around about 50 times and then the skins are broken. Normally this is done by a work animal

Olive Crushing

This is when we crushed olives and pressed them. Another very inspiring day. There are many very important steps. First we picked the olives and then you must clean them and crush them. The crushing is important because it breaks the skin to allow the oil to come out when we press them. This here is the olive crusher.

The olives go in the basin and then 5 students line up along the beam and rotate the large rock around to crush the olive skins.