Akko Boat

  Hebron - hot day

  Akko - boats and old city

  Tzfat

The bus winds up the narrow roads to the hillside town.

"You know about this place in Jerusalem, Heritage House? You can stay there for free. It's in the Old City."

I look over to Richard, the friendly young Canadian Jew I'm sharing a dingy room with. We'd both travelled by ourselves to Sefat (Tzfat), the old Kabbalistic centre perched in the Galilee hills, and ended up here at Shoshanna's Hostel.

Shoshanna, an eccentric, kindly woman with a shock of
long grey hair and a limp, had met me at the bus station and led me back to her hostel, a rundown old house tucked away in a narrow Sefat lane.

I sip a cup of sugarless, milkless tea from an ancient cup as Richard continues: "It's like this place for Jews where they try to get them to go religious. It's pretty cool. They don't hassle - just turn up for a couple of classes here and there. They have these classes in the evening; I've just been there, and I'm going back next week for a bit longer".

I spend the next day exploring the cobbled streets of the town, wondering if to gatecrash the Ascent Institute, a Kabbala study centre that didn't want me (at least when trying to book on the phone) because my mother wasn't Jewish. I went to the cemetery and witnessed some chanting over a sage's grave, behind a building pockmarked by bullets from the 1948 war.

 

  View from Ma'ayan Zvi

  The Lost City of Felafel

  50th anniversary

  Interfaith shoutfest

  Inside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem

  Hebron - David's Pool