Muristan

Day 10 First stop the Theodore Herzl memorial "If you will it, it is more than a dream"
This told the story of his dream for a Jewish state which at the first Zionist congress caused great excitement. He says "there is no national existence without territory" and declared that within 50 years there would be a Jewish state. After there was no progress at the second Jewish Congress in 1898 he sailed for Israel to discuss his vision for his people, travelling several countries arranging loans and negotiating deals to obtain a piece of the Promised Land using his own money. He died in 1904 not seeing the fulfillment of his dream, but leaving a legacy to which all Jews are indebted.. Only after the Holocaust did the world recognise the need for a Jewish state 50 years after Herzl proclaimed it would happen.
He was buried in Vienna but he was so confident of his vision that he wrote in his will to be buried in the Holy Land .In 1949 his body was interred in Israel here on Mt Herzl.
Next stop the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. 😢I really wanted to stay long enough to bear witness to the suffering, but found it overwhelming. Man's inhumanity to man at its worst and I can't even write about what I saw and heard there.
It's easy to think of 6,000,000 as a statistic but this quote on the wall stuck with me ."It is not that 6 million Jews were murdered, but that there were 6 million murders and in each of them one Jew was killed." Unfathomable.
Our last afternoon and evening in Jerusalem was spent wandering the streets soaking up the culture and enjoying a drink on the rooftop overlooking the city walls, cementing friendships old and new ❤️Read more