Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Morocco: if I had picked anywhere else on the Mediterranean for a family holiday, at least anywhere that’s not convulsed by civil war, I don’t think anyone would have noticed. But when I told friends that we were taking our children to Israel on vacation, I got some odd looks. Was there a special reason, someone wanted to know. Were we in search of political insight, asked another. Perhaps one of us was interested in finding his or her Jewish roots, an acquaintance suggested. Perhaps one of us was ‘searching’, spiritually speaking, and would like to walk in the steps of Jesus. Nobody seemed able to believe that we just…went to Israel, on Wizzair, in search of winter sunshine.
But that wasn’t the end of it. ‘What is the purpose of your visit to Israel?’ Upon arriving in Tel Aviv we were stopped, as everyone is, and asked to explain ourselves. When we mumbled something about tourism and showed our various passports — between the four of us we have two surnames, three nationalities (Polish, US, UK), various combinations of dual citizenship — we got more questions. Nobody just… goes to Israel. What was our real goal? Only when my husband produced the name of an Israeli acquaintance — a man who jumped off a train heading for Treblinka 75 years ago and joined the Polish underground — did the point of our trip seem to make sense: Ah, a connection to history, to tragedy, to heroism. We were waved ahead.
To be fair, the Israelis have good reason to assume that visitors will be ‘searching,’ whether for salvation or glory, because so many have in the past. We had lunch in Haifa’s ‘German colony,’ built by Protestants who came to the Holy Land in the 19th century to await the Second Coming.
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