A statue in the Plaza Mayor or main square of Trujillo, Spain, a well-preserved old town of 10,000 inhabitants, is dedicated to its most illustrious citizen, the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru. The Pizarro family built a handsome mansion in the Plaza Mayor about 1560. Its facade is decorated with carved images of the…
Category: Travel
A visit to Zippori in Lower Galilee
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The Talmud says that the town of Zippori, in the Lower Galilee northwest of Nazareth, was so named “because it is perched on the top of a mountain like a bird [zippor].” Also perched on this picturesque mountain, roughly 1,800 years ago, was the Sanhedrin, the grand rabbinic-judicial council of ancient Israel, whose head, Rabbi…
Another side of the Kinneret
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“We’re just about to cross the River Jordan,” says our guide, Mike Rogoff, as our van approaches a bridge traversing a gulley of greenery. “So don’t blink and don’t sneeze, or you’ll miss it. This is not the St. Lawrence. The people who wrote those marvelous spirituals — ‘the River Jordan is deep and wide’…
Neot Kedumim: Biblical nature reserve
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“A staff shall grow out of the trunk of Jesse, and an offshoot shall flourish from its roots.” — Isaiah 11:1. Multitudes of biblical and Talmudic-era plants grow at Neot Kedumim, a 625-acre nature reserve that was once so barren that its founder had to cart up topsoil from the valleys to cover the rocks…
A goat farm near Jerusalem
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Shai Zeltzer, wearing a long white beard and white apron, brings a sampling of white goats’ cheese to our table at his goat farm in Sataf in the Judean hills, a few miles outside Jerusalem. Many Israelis regularly make the drive through the region’s winding hills to buy Zeltzer’s cheeses, which have won acclaim in…
The Israeli Supreme Court
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“Justice, justice, shall you pursue.” — Deut. 16:20. Ten years after it opened, Israel’s magnificent Supreme Court building still embodies the ideals of a just and humanitarian democratic society, and still remains what my guide, Amir Orly, calls “the pearl of Israeli architecture.” The structure sits in an exclusive and stately setting in central Jerusalem,…
Lower East Side tenement preserved as museum
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An Orthodox Jewish garment presser from Lithuania, Abraham Rogarshevsky was only 45 years old when he succumbed to tuberculosis in July 1918. He died at home, surrounded by his family in their tiny three-room apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. Although there was nothing particularly remarkable or historic about Mr. Rogarshevsky — no more…
St. Regis: New York’s most expensive hotel
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Fresh from a $100 million renovation, New York’s prestigious St. Regis Hotel, situated on 55th St. at Fifth Avenue, is the epitome of luxury hotels in Manhattan. The St. Regis is definitely not for the budget-minded. The lowest category of room (“superior”) commands $350 per night: a “grand luxe” room costs $450, a “grand suite”…
Finding the Biblical David on the road to Beit Guvrin
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We were driving southward through Israel’s Shephelah region when our guide pulled the van over to the shoulder and drew our attention to a ridge of hills to the right of us and a roughly parallel ridge to the left. We were south of Beit Shemesh on the road to Beit Guvrin, near the Ha-Ela…
Moored in Morocco: tale of an 18th-century Jewish traveller
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From the earliest days of Hebrew printing to the present, Jewish readers have found great favor in literary accounts of Jewish travellers, especially those who, like the famed 12th-century Benjamin of Tudela, provided first-hand descriptions of the holy city of Jerusalem. One of the acknowledged classics of the genre is Travail in an Arab Land,…
