Sunday, February 27th

Approaching Jerusalem



The Apple Core Sculpture



Our group

The World Upside Down

Group at The Shrine of the Book

The Old City

Mt. of Olives

Today the bus picked us up from the hotel at 9:00 am for our trip to Jerusalem.  As we drove north on the four lane highway, we travel on a plain for about 30 minutes and then began as gradual ascent until we reached the Judean hills near Jerusalem and then the ascent became very dramatic as we gained about 2,400 ft in elevation to reach the city.  The closer we came to the city, the more we found the landscape covered with houses and small apartment buildings and the more rugged the terrain became.  The city is very hilly and the traffic was fairly congested, because this is the first work day of the week.  It is springtime in this area and there were flowering almond trees in the Judean hills and poppies and yellow flowers blooming.  The bus took us past the government buildings and the Knesset, and to the Israel Museum, which is located on the top of one of the hills in the new city with a commanding view of the area.  The Israel Museum was recently opened after an extensive renovation.  We had a superb docent who took us through selected portions of the museum and explained some of their most impressive modern art and “living” art.  The archaeology section contained excellent exhibits on man through time in this region and a unique collection of anthropoid sarcophagi of Canaanites.  The collection is these galleries go back from as far as 1.5 million BCE. 
Our next stop in the complex was The Shrine of the Book which focuses on the Dead Sea scrolls and life in the Qumran community.  The roof of the shrine is in the shape of the lid of the jars in which the scrolls were found in 1947 and 2/3 of the shrine is below ground with an entranceway to the central room constructed to resemble a cave.  The centerpiece of the shrine is a copy of the Great Isaiah Scroll in a 360 degree display case that looks like one of the wooden rods around which the Torah scrolls are rolled.  The exhibit on the lower level also covers the history of the Aleppo Codex, which is considered to be the most accurate existing manuscript of the Masoretic text.   Its text is practically identical to the pre-Masoretic version of the biblical text that has been preserved in some of the biblical scrolls found at Qumran (approximately one thousand years older than the Codex) and the somewhat later scroll fragments found at Masada, as well as some of the biblical fragments discovered in the Cairo Genizah. The Codex originally contained 380 leaves, but, unfortunately, only 295 of them have survived, representing some three-quarters of the Bible.
After leaving the museum, we drove to a look-out point where we had a gorgeous view to the north of the Old City and the Mount of Olives.   Because the day was so clear, the golden dome of the Dome of the Rock glistened in the sun and all the details of the Old City could be seen.  The hilliness of the area was also very evident.  Our drive continued on to Kibbutz Ramat Rachel where we had a later lunch/early supper. Before returning to Shenkar for the beginning of the conference, which included a poster snapshot session and a fashion show of historical costumes from the 14^th through 20^th centuries CE.  All the costumes were designed and made true to the details of the respective time periods by second year fashion design students and modeled by those students.  The modeling was accompanied by music of that time period.  We had a most enjoyable time.  Once the program was over, we were taken by bus back to our hotels and arrived around 10 pm.  Tomorrow we return to Shenkar for the Color Symposium and a full day of activities.