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page 6i)

jerusalem

T

An Orthodox Jew walks
down a Safad street as
mission goers shopped.

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5/7

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his is the place we've been talking about forever," said Rabbi
Harold Loss of Temple Israel as 610 of us boarded tour buses at
Ben-Gurion Airport to begin the third Michigan Miracle Mission
in Israel.
And he was right.
For six months, we'd planned and prepared for our 10-day visit to the
Jewish homeland from April 18 to 28. Now, we were there, under the aus-
pices of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit.
It was a time of incredible highs (praying at the Kotel, scaling Masada)
and incredible lows (the deaths of Naomi Kline and Jerry Levin).
It was a time of spirituality (virtually everywhere in Jerusalem) and
solemnity (at the Latrun war memorial and the Yad Vashem Holocaust
memorial).
It also was a time of biblical images (in the Old City and at the Beit
Shean archaeological ruins), holy cities (Jerusalem, Safad, Tiberias and
Hebron) and rugged spirit (the Bedoin settlements).
We learned that Israel — a country of 6 million Jews, Arabs, Muslims
and Druse — ranks near the top worldwide in per-capita cellular phones.
We learned that the brave pioneers who chanced it in Rishon Le-Zion,
outside present-day Tel Aviv, perfected the mining of groundwater in the
1880s, helping clear the way for other Jewish settlements in water-starved
Palestine.
And we learned that Israel, through the Jewish National Fund, is perhaps
a decade away from having enough desalination plants to sufficiently turn
salt water into drinking water.
We discovered where to shop (Old Jaffa, Safad, Ben Yehudah Street),
where to grow culturally (the Museum of the Diaspora, the Israel Museum ),
where to feel freedom at work (Burma Road, the Ayalon Institute) and
where to relax (the Dead Sea).
We met residents of our Partnership 2000 sister region in the Central
Galilee (from Nazareth, Nazareth Illit, Migdal HaFmek and the Jezreel
Valley).
And we were awestruck by the Second Temple tunnels and the Herodian
Mansion beneath the Old City.
We also were exposed to Mission Chairman Ben Rosenthal's passion for
sharing Israel with fellow Detroiters.
As Mission Honorary Chairman Larry Jackier put it at the farewell party
back at Ben-Gurion Airport, "Nothing happens by accident. The thought,
the planning, the execution of the miracle that is our mission all germinated
in my good friend, Ben Rosenthal." 7