Visiting the Israeli Air Force Museum

April 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Dark blue and white fighter jet

Israeli-made Kfir, based on the French Mirage 5

Ahead of next week’s Yom HaZikaron (Israeli Memorial Day) and Yom HaAtzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) holidays, I thought a post about the Israeli Air Force Museum would be appropriate. The Air Force Museum is located at Hatzerim Air Force Base, just southwest of the Negev city of Beersheva.

Though many people know about and visit the tank museum at Latrun, with its array of tanks from around the world, fewer people are aware of this museum with its collection of over 150 airplanes from Israel’s aviation history. Perhaps this is due to its more remote location, but a visit is well worth your time if the subject interests you, and it is a particularly good place for kids to learn a significant aspect of Israel’s history.

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Exploring Herod’s Tomb

February 27, 2013 by 4 Comments
Geometric tiled floor and stone tub.

Opus Sectile tiled floor and Herod’s private bathtub. (Photo courtesy of Howie Osterer)

Herod the Great is a tour guide’s dream. He is such a colorful and complex character that he offers as many good stories as amazing sites to marvel at. He was an unparalleled builder, a bloodthirsty madman who killed many members of his own family, an egotist with major insecurities, a paranoid who suspected both Rome and the Jews of hatred, a brilliant businessman, and a tenacious ruler, to name just a few of his more significant aspects.

Generally, tour guides explore different aspects of King Herod’s character via different sites. But it’s difficult to visit a single site that fully captures his complexity. Until now, that is. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem has just opened a special exhibit entitled Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey. And while I can’t say that it covers all sides of Herod’s life, it does a great job of building a multifaceted portrait of the king.

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Israel: Land of Diversity

August 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Hedge arch in Akko Baha'i Gardens. Israel.

Take a seat and enjoy the view in the Baha’i Gardens in Akko, surrounding the Shrine of the Baha’ullah

I just finished guiding an American family for the past two weeks, and we traveled all over Israel. We left out the Negev (south) because it is too hot in the middle of August, but beyond that, we pretty much hit the rest of the country and got at least a taste of all of its diverse regions. I designed the itinerary, and when planning an itinerary of this nature, the main guiding principle is going to be geography, i.e. we visit things that are close together on a single day, and move from region to region in logical sequence. In this case, we basically made a circular route, heading from the airport to Tel Aviv, then up the coast, across the Galilee to the Golan Heights and Kineret region, down the Jordan Valley to the Dead Sea, and then to Jerusalem and the Shefelah/Lowlands.

Of course, in designing such a tour, I also aim to present things that show various aspects of what this country has to offer. No one wants to spend two weeks seeing the same things over and over. But it wasn’t until I was on the tour with this family, a few days in, that it hit me just how diverse were the sites we were visiting. I know I’ve discussed Israel’s diversity before, but I was still impressed that we literally visited almost no sites that were redundant with each other.

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Jerusalem, Meet Jerusalem: Nahalaot

July 15, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Nahalaot Street, Jerusalem

Nahalaot, Jerusalem

This coming Friday, July 20, I will be leading the next in my continuing series of Jerusalem walking tours — Jerusalem, Meet Jerusalem. Following logically from my prior tour of the first three Jewish neighborhoods built outside the walls of the Old City (Mishkenot Sha’ananim, Machane Yisrael and Nachalat Shiva), I am now giving a tour of one of the more unique neighborhoods in Jerusalem: Nahalaot. Nahalot finds it origins just a few years after those earliest neighborhoods, and expands on the settlement patterns those first three neighborhoods established.

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Walking in a Byzantine-Era Synagogue

July 1, 2012 by 1 Comment

Bimah in Umm el-Kanatir Synagogue. Golan Heights. Israel.

The Bimah at the front of the Umm el-Kanatir Synagogue

Almost anyone who has traveled throughout the north of Israel, especially if you have gone with a tour guide who took you to places you might not have visited on your own, has seen the ruins of Byzantine-era synagogues. There are many, with some of the more famous or impressive ones found at Bar’am, Tiberias and Tzippori. But on a trip to the Golan Heights this past week, I had the pleasure of revisiting a very exciting Byzantine synagogue that I had first seen almost exactly a year ago.

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New Walking Tour Series: Jerusalem, Meet Jerusalem

June 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment
An early drawing of Mishkenot Shaananim, Jerusalem, Israel.

Mishkenot Sha'ananim, the first neighborhood built outside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, in a 19th Century engraving (late 1860s?)

For some time now I have wanted to apply my knowledge as a licensed tour guide in Israel to help my friends and acquaintances learn more about their country. Obviously, the bulk of my work will be with incoming tourists, but most Israeli residents and citizens love to explore their own country almost as much as foreign, visiting tourists. So one of the things I am beginning to do is run a series of short walking tours in different neighborhoods of Jerusalem, the city I live in and love.

I am entitling the series “Jerusalem, Meet Jerusalem” because it is largely designed to help Jerusalemites better get to know the city they live in. But of course these Jerusalem walking tours are also open to tourists and Israelis from other cities!

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A Walking Tour on Yom Yerushalayim

May 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment
MMY girls and Fun Joel, Israel Tour Guide at the Haas Promenade / Tayelet

Me and the overseas students from MMY Seminary at the Haas Promenade / Tayelet

As many of you know, today is the 45th Yom Yerushalayim / Jerusalem Day, the holiday that celebrates the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 during the Six Day War. In celebration, I was asked to give a tour to a group of overseas students in a gap year program here in Jerusalem. They are studying for the year at the MMY Girls’ Seminary, and they are located in my neighborhood. So the tour was supposed to both focus on the subject of Yom Yerushalayim, but also to tell them more about the neighborhood they’ve spent the year in.

I’ll briefly review the whole tour, but I want to really focus on our last stop, at the Tayelet, or Haas Promenade.

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A Tour of Wineries in Eretz Binyamin / Samaria

May 13, 2012 by 3 Comments
Tanya Winery vinyeards. Ofra. Fun Joel Israel Tour Guide.

The vineyards of Tanya Winery in Ofra

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting five different wineries with some other tour guides and friends. The wineries were all located in the region of Eretz Binyamin — the area that was designated in the Bible for the tribe of Benjamin. Today it is part of the region known as Samaria, and there are at least 7 or 8 wineries in this small part of the hill country, a mere 25 miles or so apart. But before I get into the wineries themselves, I want to talk briefly about Israeli wines overall.

I love the story of the wine industry in Israel. Clearly one of the oldest and most famous industries in the land, winemaking was always an important identifying feature of Israel. Images, for example, of the spies sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan, and their reports of giant grape clusters spring to mind. In fact, that very image is the logo of both Israel’s Ministry of Tourism and the largest wine producer in the country — Carmel Wineries.

However, with the arrival of Muslim rule, which lasted for about 1100 of the 1300 years prior to the 20th Century, Israeli wines virtually disappeared. Since Muslims are prohibited from drinking wine, virtually all Israeli wine production ceased, with perhaps a minor resurgence during the 200-year period of Crusader rule in the land (1099-1291, with periods of Muslim rule inside that time frame as well).

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A Tour of Crusader Caesarea

July 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Moat of Crusader City of Caesarea

The moat and walls of Caesarea's Crusader-era city.

When most people visit Caesarea, the beautiful Israeli coastal city between Netanya and Haifa, they focus on its history and archaeology in the Herodian (early Roman) and Byzantine periods. While most visitors walk right through the heart of the Crusader era city, they barely pay any attention to it. But the truth is that Caesarea has some of the best remains in Israel through which to gain an understanding of the architecture of the late Crusades, and of the impact that this slice of history had on the land of Israel.

I remember the first time I visited Caesarea (a few years ago), I started as most people do at the southern end of the National Park, near the Roman-era Theater. We toured through most of the Roman and Byzantine areas, and then approached a large, walled-in area. As we passed through the wall, I saw a large open space with lots of green grass. Inside of these walls I also found a number of stores and restaurants, which probably contributes to the area being overlooked within the archaeology at Caesarea. True, the walls are virtually impossible to miss. But when the inside has a lot of modern stores and eateries, it is easy to overlook the history, despite the benefits of this mix.

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Environmental Tour of the Negev

May 9, 2011 by Leave a Comment
BrightSource Solar Array

Heliostat array at BrightSource's Rotem test facility

I took a friend down to the Negev desert last week for a tour focused on various environmental topics. We visited sites and discussed issues of CleanTech/Green energy, water usage, desert agriculture, ecology, etc. In addition to being interesting for me, I see it as another niche in which I may work in the future (a number of people expressed an interest in a tour like this once I described it). I designed the tour almost as a “mission,” mixing traditional site visits, meeting with experts and tours of business sites.

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