Dear Friends, I managed one dispatch during our tour, but then no more until now – flying back across the ocean to home in Woodstock. But I would still like to share some of the highlights of our trip with you. Palmach Museum Tel Aviv is such a vibrant city – it is at the […]
Archive | Travel Dispatches
Israel Journal, December 2013: Jewish Spiritual Renewal in Tel Aviv
Dear Friends, I have the privilege of sending you dispatches from our latest WJC tour of Israel. Our itinerary is substantially different from past trips, a conscious effort to provide our return travelers with new experiences and insights into Israeli life and history. To this end, we have spent the first four days of our […]
An Extraordinary Bar Mitzvah in Germany, and Impressions of Prague
Dear Friends, I am in the midst of a brief but deeply moving and fascinating trip to Germany and the Czech Republic, and I want to share some of my experiences and observations with you all. This post is fairly long, so please take your time, and I hope you find it worthwhile. The purpose of […]
A Final Miracle in Tel Aviv
Dear Friends, Tel Aviv was the final stop on our tour. During the morning we visited the Jaffa Institute, an impressive non-profit organization that does its best to support at-risk youth, and poor and underserved populations in the greater Tel Aviv area. The Jaffa Institute’s spokesman was Mitch Chupak, a lovely man who, even though he has […]
Around the Galilee: It’s Complicated…
Dudu On our Israel tours a bus driver is assigned to us for the entire trip. Our driver this time was Dudu.Dudu was a tall, handsome and well-groomed man from a family of Kurdish Jews. Dudu possessed breathtaking skill at maneuvering a full-sized bus through streets that had never been intended for cars, let alone busses. What […]
Masada
Dear Friends, Wow. I am traveling with such a beautiful group of people, and we are having an extraordinary time together, even life changing for some of the participants. I hope some of you (all of you!) reading this missive will be able to join me on a future trip to Israel. I will describe some more […]
Heading South
Dear Friends, I write this evening from my hotel room in the desert town of Arad. We will be rising at 4:15 in the morning tomorrow in order to ride the bus down to Masada, and plan to climb to the top in time to witness the sunrise. This has been a magnificent and moving trip […]
Shabbat in Jerusalem
(The following series of posts are a partial account of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation’s most recent trip to Israel, December 21-31, 2010) Having spent 3 intense days immersed in a crash course of Jerusalem’s past and present, I knew that Shabbat would be a special joy for our group. We gathered in the beautiful garden of […]
Bicycling from Jerusalem to Eilat, Part 3
I made it! I sit this Monday evening on the veranda of a coffee house in Eilat, enjoying the evening breeze and looking across the Red Sea at the lights of Aqaba, Jordan. I surprised myself and bicycled 330 miles to get here, and though I’m tired I actually have worked myself into better condition over the […]
Bicycling from Jerusalem to Eilat, Part 2
I am pleased to report that my body is giving me the power I need to meet all of my cycling goals thus far. I rode 94 miles on Thursday, by far the longest I have ridden since an ill-considered 100-mile ride from Providence, Rhode Island to Martha’s Vineyard when I was 19 – on a […]