I arrived to the hotel at around 2 am on Friday and by 10 Adele and I were at the Israel Musuem to see the Herod Exhibit, which was great. Ehud Netzer finally found the actual tomb after twenty years of looking in the wrong place. Sadly, on the day he was organizing the museum exhibit, he fell at the Herodium site and died.
Herod was a megalomaniac and he destroyed all the palaces and the theater on the bottom of the Herodium hill so that he could have a smooth mountain on which to place the tomb. The tomb was visible from miles around, had a conical crown (like the so-called Tomb of Absalom in Jerusalem), and had a round colonnade on a square pedestal. So it was square, topped by circle, topped by cone, with the whole thing being about 150 feet high. The tomb itself (the round part) was excavated and brought to the museum. The sarcophagus itself is quite plain and doesn't come close to the magnificent "Alexander the Great" Sarcophagus in Istanbul. No photos allowed!
Yonatan's wedding was non-stop celebration: dinner for 100 Friday night; Kiddush lunch at the Khan Theater and the wedding in the nature preserve that presents all the biblical plants. The wedding was romantic with bride and groom reading "love letters" to each other under the Chupah and Yonatan singing to Chana.
Mom and I had Shabbat lunch after the kiddush at Julie and Yaakov Schorr's home and Julie invited Fred and Paula who live across the street. (They are not related at all.)
Paula was just recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a very big deal.
Fred has become Chairman of the Board of Haifa University.
On Sunday, Ben Zion Hochstein gave us a tour of Shaare Zedek Hospital, of which he is chairman. I finally saw more of it than the eye clinic (Miriam!)
I took the tram (light rail) for its entire length from Har Herzl to some distant Jewish neighborhood on the other side of some Arab villages. It took about 45 minutes and I saw parts of the City I had never seen before. I recommend it as a tourist attraction.
I left Israel this morning (Tuesday) on a 7 am flight, so I left the Inbal at 4 am. What fun!
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