Day 7: Netanya and the Forgotten People Fund

Today we met Anne Silverman, chairman of Forgotten People Fund in Netanya, dedicated to helping the Ethiopian Jewish community meet their basic needs.



FPF provides food vouchers for use at their local supermarket to insure that there is enough food in the house for the children to eat. FPF pays utility bills (water, gas, electricity) and city taxes to help the families through their difficult times. FPF pays school fees and provides scholarships for middle and high school students and college and university students, and sends technicians to repair electrical, plumbing and appliance breakdowns as the Ethiopian families’ budgets don’t allow for such emergencies.



FPF is an organization of volunteers. They have no office, no paid workers and no overhead! They operate out of their own apartments and thus are able to keep expenses to 1.5% of income from contributions. This means that 98.5% of the proceeds from donations go directly to their needy families. More important – FPF is a friend that the Ethiopian families can depend on. Having been disappointed so often by the bureaucracy of the social welfare system, they find FPF is a beacon of light in their darkest moments.

To help them with their absorption, FPF has launched a series of Nutrition Courses where the women are taught how to prepare healthy yet economical meals for their families, how to shop at the supermarket and downtown open market for the best value, and how important the combination of the food groups is for the nutrition of their children. FPF also distributes children’s multiple vitamins (kosher) which we receive from the USA and vitamin drops for babies (6 mos. – 3 years) to help ensure healthy teeth and bones during growth spurts.



We temporarily fast forwarded our walk today from Mt. Tabor and met them on the beach this morning, along with about 30 volunteers, to walk 10 km of the Shvil Yisrael as a fundraiser. I'm happy to report it was a smashing success! Many of the volunteers were American, British, and Canadian immigrants to Israel looking to help the poorest members of their community.

Anne made a good point today about the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, or "healing the world". Frequently we hear about the overwhelming number of Christian and secular NGOs that help the poorest of Third World countries, but rarely if ever do we hear about Jewish charities helping poor Jews. The world seems to assume that the poor Jew these days is a myth, when in reality even in Israel there is crushing poverty many places in the country.

The Jewish approach to charity is always to act locally first. Thus, a Jew is supposed to take care of his immediate family, then his village, his city, and so on in degrees of closeness. The best way for the Jewish nation to fulfill its goal of healing the world is to be unified as a people, and that means taking care of those Jews who are suffering right in front of us.

The world taking notice of how much we care for our own will do more to further this cause than any amount of propaganda could ever do, and only then can we truly be a light unto the nations.

-Jeremy

Day 5: Ginosar to Ein Porea

As many of you know, I've been studying at Yeshivat Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem for the past 10 months along with Bradley. One of the classes I have during the day is called Intro to Gemara. The Gemara is the explanation, argumentation, and elucidation of the Mishna, which is the Oral Torah derived from the written text of what many (non-Jews) would call the Old Testament. The first books of the Gemara deals with blessings, or brachot.

In one of the Mishnas it says that the only blessing that takes precedence over the blessing for bread when having a meal is for something really really salty. When, the Gemara asks, would someone eat something so unbelievably salty? Only when eating something so sweet that one would have to heavily counterbalance the flavors. The Gemara then goes on to explain how the only thing that could be that sweet is the fruit of Ginosar, telling of Rabbis who would eat 10,000 fruits without gaining an ounce, or of flies dripping off of the sweet oil on their foreheads.

Anyway, that's where we started.

After the rough day we had yesterday, the walk today was the perfect recipe. We walked all the way to the top of Tiberias from sea level and through the Swiss Forest.





Just an unbelievably quiet, peaceful, and beautiful walk winding down to the beach resort of Ein Porea where we headed back by bus to Tzfat to celebrate Shabbat.



Shavua Tov to all of you and here's hoping that the next week is as exciting as the first one.

-Jeremy

Day 4: Shimon bar Yochai to Ginosar and the Sea!

It feels so good to say that after four days we made it to the shores of the Kinneret. Today was an absolute scorcher that saw Brandon succumb halfway to dehydration and head back to Jerusalem at the first road crossing. We basically sprinted the first two hours of the trail today to get ahead of the schoolchildren going in the same direction. The terrain became very difficult as we had to scramble up from the bottom of the riverbed of Wadi Amud to the ridge above. Bradley made the trip easier by telling me harrowing adventures of people nearly dying on cliffs such as these.



We met a beast of a Dutchman named Metzger around halfway through who "grew up on the Bible" and was very fascinated with the State of Israel's redemption after the Holocaust. He told us he was hiking 40 km a day on the Shvil and this was his 11th time visiting Israel after working on a kibbutz in 1974. He also has the quote of the trip so far. When asked whether he had been on adventures such as this one before he replied: "I like walking. I do it often."



The rock formations and cliffs were amazing though, with the sign telling us that this wadi was home to prehistoric man and structures and strata all the way up to present times.



Today was incredibly hot though. In what was surely a preview of the Negev, we had to stop for an hour in the shade to escape the heat due to general woozyness.



But oh my how the payoff was worth it. We broke off from the main trail to wind to the Sea of Galilee at Ginosar, through banana plantations and wheat fields.







And finally, success!



-Jeremy

P.S. All pictures should be up on my facebook account soon but I think I'll open a flickr one as well for those who don't like creepy social networking sites.

Day 3: Bar-Am Forest to the Grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai lived in the era of the Tannaim (scholars of the Mishnah) in the area of what is today Israel during the Roman period, after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. He was one of the most eminent disciples of Rabbi Akiva (spiritual leader of the Bar Kochba revolt), and is mainly associated with the authorship of the Zohar, the principal text of Jewish mysticism. Legend has it that when he died his soul ascended to heaven in a great pillar of fire. On the anniversary of his death, hundreds of thousands of Jews ascend upon his gravesite in Mt. Meron and light massive bonfires to commemorate this experience. It is also a custom dating from the time of Rabbi Isaac Luria for Jewish parents to bring their three-year-old sons here for their first haircuts.

And so this was our destination for the day, giving us our first major landmark to look forward to. We had the most amount of traffic today, running into school group after school group doing field trips and day hikes.







Bradley loves to entertain kids by singing crazy Chassidic songs and dancing in the middle of the trail. It was very hilly today, but seeing Shimon bar Yochai’s grave in the distance gave us a new breath of fresh air.



Finally we made it to the grave, grabbing some ice cream and davening mincha. Matthew bade us farewell and we staked out a prime camping spot. There were hundreds of teenagers camping in the same area, while they were on a three month jewish history tour of Israel from the D.C and Atlanta areas of the US. Thankfully they had some food left over for us, and after a hilarious miscommunication of intentions where the staff thought Bradley (a 30 year old man with a beard) was really trying to pose as an American teenager, we settled in for the night, singing songs and lighting a decent fire.



-Jeremy

Day 2: Moshav Yiftach to Bar-Am Forest

After a much needed night of sleep and a morning of heavily taped feet, we set off for our next destination, the Bar-Am Forest.



Today was absolutely stunning, as the trail wound through forests and bunkers left over from the 1948 War of Independence.





We hit the Naftali Ridge today, south of Kiryat Shmona, and the Metzudat Coach memorial at the UN compound in the Upper Galilee.





Bradley managed once again to find us a place to stay as we found a kibbutz worker who secured us (what looked like) a transient crack den to sleep for the evening. Promises of an open pub night proved to be unfounded because kibbutz outsiders were not allowed. Kibbutz Bar-Am is one of the few remaining "old school" kibbutzim around Israel. How? Nobody actually has any money of their own here. Socialism, it's fantastic!



-Jeremy

Interview with Matthew

Matthew had pretty much every gadget and food item known to man. He gave us some great advice for the days ahead.

-Jeremy

Day 1: Tel Dan to Moshav Yiftach

Our 1000 km journey started off in Tel Dan. We agreed to do the walk from north to south for several reasons:

1: Elevation. The overall elevation from Tel Dan to Eilat would drop off considerably. Staring up from Eilat into the Negev Desert on Day 1 was not such an appealing prospect.

2: Acclimitization. Mistakes are much easier to correct up north where there is a much higher concentration of kibbutzim, moshavim, scattered cities, and places to buy food and get water. If we miscalculated distance or places to stay we could adjust on the fly, whereas in the Negev there are many spots where there is simply no way to get water in or out from the trail.

And screw up we did.

The day started innocently enough with Brandon being interviewed live for Channel 2 News.



We met a fellow Shvil hiker named Matthew (from Lynwood, Washington, about 30 minutes from my hometown) and managed to get a short interview with him at the start. He proved to be quite an amazing addition to our team for the first two days as Brandon was struggling a bit to keep up with the group. He regaled us with great stories of his hiking adventures around the world.

In the first two hours we seemingly came up against every obstacle all at once. First, we had to navigate through a herd of bulls scattered across our path.



Next we hit a rainstorm and a large stream with hidden barbed wire across the path that almost ended our trip before it started.



Soon we hit our first moshav along the way as for the first we could see the city of Kiryat Shmona in the distance. The trail markings were a bit spotty and we ended up on the wrong side of a rather large security fence. Matthew, being eagle-eyed, spotted a way under the fence.



The next few hours were fantastic as we ascended the hills overlooking Kiryat Shmona and had lunch at the Kfar Giladi memorial cemetary.



We had planned on stopping at Mishkenot HaRoim for the night to camp, but we completely miscalculated how much time we had left, along with the mistake of leaving our camping gear in the support car. By this time we had hit a massive driving rainstorm and doubts were creeping into our head about whether we'd be able to make it to a road crossing before nightfall.





Thankfully though, we managed to hit a road crossing just after nightfall and we made our way up the road another kilometer to Moshav Yiftach where we were invited to stay in the gym and use their locker room showers. In the morning we were treated to cake and tea by the staff. Relieved to have survived Day 1, we knew the planning could only get better from here.



-Jeremy