Act IV begins

It's been a crazy 24 hours! I won't bore you with the details of my trip from Prague to Israel, but basically, the flight left at 11:15pm and arrived in Israel at around 4 am with an hour ahead time different. You can guess how tired I was after little sleep on the plane! One quick note about the ride: when I sat down in my seat, I noticed a red Star of David on one of the overhead compartments--probably where a first-aid kit is kept. But my first reaction was, "Why is there a star there? Either it's vandalism or there's some Jewish significance." I guess that's what a long trip in Eastern Europe can do to you! Anyway, after a long wait in passport control, I finally was able to pick up my bag and leave the airport for Jerusalem, where I'm staying for the next week. I'm staying with my mom's friend--also named Renee--and I arrived here at about 6:30am. I decided it would be best for me to take a nap, so after a quick breakfast and shower, I ended up sleeping until 10:30.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, my time here in Israel is for further research but also relaxation, and so my first stop after lunch (and an unsuccessful attempt to contact Zayde's cousin here) was my friend Abby's apartment! That's when it hit me that it was only the second time in five and a half weeks that I talked to someone my age. I went back tonight--it was so nice to finally have some time to catch up with friends.

After Abby's I made my way over to Yad Vashem. I decided that I should make use of a couple free hours today to visit the library at Yad Vashem to assess what's there and how much time I'll need to spend there in the coming days. I think I mentioned at some point that at Yad Vashem, anyone can use the library facilities, including the International Tracing Service (ITS) database, and that's the main reason why I'm doing work there. The International Tracing Service is a database that contains wartime and post-war documents that were, for many years, held in Germany, but were recently released to Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum in Washington. The museum in Washington accepts online requests to have the database searched for submitted names, last names, etc., but the results of these searches often take up to a year to be returned. At Yad Vashem though, I'm able to search the database myself...and I now know why these requests take so long to be returned. There's so much to look through! The database contains documents related to all kinds of different places, time periods, groups of people, and more, and I think if I didn't know what I wanted to find, it would be overwhelming to search. I think, though, that I'm only going to search for a limited set of things (mainly information about Grandma Esther and Zayde's first family), because otherwise, I could spend ages looking through all the documents.

Tomorrow is back to Yad Vashem to see what I can find, and more attempts to get in contact with Zayde's cousin. Wish me luck!