Joe’s May 2008 Trek Thru Israel, Eastern Europe & The Balkans En Route to Auschwitz Along the Same Rail Transport Lines my Ancestors Rode to the Death Camps

We drove into Haifa and I called my two friends that I made on the trip.  Avi was not around, and Ophir returned my call immediately.  He drove over to the beach that we were on and insisted on showing us the city; particularly the real surfing beaches.  Turns out he and his kids are hard core surfers.  We found a hotel for Josh, Jacob and Rebecca to stay, and he insisted that I stay overnight at his home.  Turns out that he had worked in a restaraunt in Santa Monica twenty years ago after he finished his military service.  Of course it was called Haifa Restaraunt.  It was very generous of Ophir and his wife to invite me to stay at his home.  Later that evening he succeeded in getting us into a fully booked Greek Nightclub with his wife and his parents.  His parents are from Thessaloniki, Greece.  They had left prior to the war, but his Mom had lost all of here family who stayed in Greece; and like my family persihed in the Holocaust.  He pursued this train trip that we met on because he is so intersted in the Greek Jews which is such a small remaining population throughout the world.  But now lets talk about the Club that we went to. 

This Club is More Greek Than In Greece!  What a blast!  At first I was worried Josh, Jacob and Rebecca would be bored.  As soon as the bozouki player started playing and the singer started bellowing, the kids melted into the four hour celebration of life.  What a pleasant surprise for them and me.  We spent the night in Haifa.  Next morning, I could not get the gang of three moving out of the hotel until the last minute of the hotel booking because they had to finish watching the Laker game. 

We saw the Bahai Gardens which are spectacular and I viewed the entire city from a high point.  From there, we saw the strategic industrial and other sites that were attacked by missiles in the Lebanon War of two years ago.  The oil refinery is in the City and the Chlorine storage tanks are in the heart of this industrial city which is the most important port in Israel.  Also, the Israeli Navy is situated at the port as are two major hospitals.  All of these sites were targeted for missile strikes during the war.   During the war, the Iranian supplied missiles stuck the city, but none of them hit their above noted intented targets.  Instead, they overshot their targets and hit residential areas and the post office that my new english speaking translator Israeli friend from the train trip is the Manager.  He happened to have closed the post office only fifteen minutes prior to the missile striking and destroying the entire building in the heart of the city.  He told me that the missile was so massive, tha the force of the impact crashed through the roof of hte building and burrowed all the way down into the basement bomb shelter which was uninhabited.  He had let the workers leave earlier in the day, and he only left at noon, because his wife called to tell him that she found a dentist that would see him immediately to treat a toothache.  Lucky is an understatement.  The post office, as all buildings that were struck by the missles have all been rebuilt today.  The Israeli government has since concluded that the Iranian intelligence community rented apartments overlooking the city claiming to be studying at the Bahai World Center in Haifa.  They established all the coordinates for the missile strikes, but word has it that they are very angry with the Hezbollah for screwing up so royally the strikes that missed every strategic target.  The problems were compounded by the media who were at the same high vantage point that I stood.  During the war, they were reporting on every hit, thus enabling the Hezbollah to recalibrate their launches with real time news reporting.  These certainly were not Katushas which are firecrackers in comparison to these missiles.

Ophir and his wife took us to lunch at a great restaraunt that only served Humus.  You could never believe how many ways one could serve Humus.  It was in the Israeli Arab part of the City and was a great area.  From there, we did the one hour drive in Saturday afternoon classic Tel Aviv traffic.  Thank goodness for GPS when you drive a foreign country.  There is no way we could have done this 700 kilometer trip over four days without it.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 2:13 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.