ANU – Museum of the Jewish People

This morning we reunited with the students from Karmiel/Misgav to first visit ANU – Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv. Through many interactive exhibits, the museum portrays the story of the Jewish people over the generations and up to the present time, highlighting the creative works and cultural flourishing of a variety of communities in different periods of history.

Back to the Maccabees

After a picnic deli sandwich lunch, our next stop was at Tel Maresha, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in an area known as the “Land of a Thousand Caves,” where we got our hands dirty as amateur archeologists. The man-made chalk caves at Maresha were used for quarries, burial grounds, animal shelters, workshops, and underground spaces for raising doves and pigeons. We learned that ancient inscriptions discovered at the site provide archeological credibility for the story of Chanukah and the Second Book of Maccabees. How cool!

Our simple instructions were to scrape, schlep, sift, and schvitz, not necessarily in that order. While digging and sifting through rock and dirt in the caves, CDS Class of 2023 stumbled upon bones and plenty of pottery shards that perhaps hadn’t been used in 2,000 years (maybe not since Maccabee family Shabbat dinner).

After all that digging, we had to haul our archeological finds, along with the heavy buckets of clay and rocks, back to the surface to sort together with our friends from Karmiel/Misgav.

And at last …. THE BEACH!!!!!!!