Ferrara; Trip to Jerusalem

Robert Burns wrote, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.”  Or, as the Yiddish saying goes, “Man plans and God laughs.”  Well, we did a lot of planning, but it didn’t turn out as we planned.  We were supposed to meet Leah in Paris and travel to Israel with her.

I’m writing this as we sit in the Paris CDG airport for 7 hours.  Leah’s flight from Rochester to JFK to CDG went perfectly, and she got there as planned.  Our flight from Florence to CDG was cancelled.  Many of our fellow Road Scholar travelers who were leaving on Saturday morning had flights cancelled because of fog.  On Saturday evening, we got notice from Air France that we would leave from Pisa on Sunday morning, not Florence.  We should be at the Florence airport at 4:00 AM to check in, and after check in they would send us by bus to Pisa and then to Paris.  The change of planes in Paris for Tel Aviv was 55 minutes now.  I called Air France and they said, after a lot of looking around, that it was the only option and we should make it.  We would have if the plane didn’t take off almost an hour late.  CDG airport is huge, and we had to go through passport control as we are leaving the EU.  We ran, and while texting with Leah who boarded, we got to the gate 5 minutes after the gate closed.  The plane was still there!!!

So here we sit.  We are booked on the next flight to Tel Aviv which is at 5:55 PM arriving (after a one-hour time change) in Israel at 11:25 PM.  Leah will wait for us at the airport in Israel and we’ll all travel from there to our Air B&B in Jerusalem together.

Yesterday we took the high-speed train to Ferrara, a 70-minute trip at 150 MPH.  The Florence station is a 4-minute walk from our hotel, right in the middle of town.  Remarkable.  Why we haven’t been able to do this in the USA is beyond me.  But, that’s another story.  We traveled as far as Ferrara with Larry and Irena Goldman who were on their way to Venice on the same 8:20 AM train.  We arrived on time in Ferrara, and walked to the MEIS, the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah, the focus of this day trip.  Joyce had clipped an article on it from the NYTimes in April, 2019.  The building has a large menorah over the door, and a presence of both police and military guarding it:

The permanent exhibit is a timeline of the Jewish presence in what is now Italy from Roman times until the Renaissance.  Some of the rooms have no artifacts (and instead have videos and photos) and some of the artifacts are reproductions of things in other museums, but it’s all very well done.  There are two temporary exhibits, one on the history of the Jewish presence in Ferrara which was interesting, and one on the Children of the Shoah, done in conjunction with Yad Vashem, which was completely in Italian—no other language.

We spent most of our time in the permanent exhibit, and I’ll present a couple of highlights.  The story of the sacking of Jerusalem and the bringing of treasure and slaves back to Rome is one we’ve heard before.  We’ve seen, from below, the frieze on the Arch of Titus, but here there is a very well done reproduction on a wall which allows for a much better and longer view of it:

The treasure from Jerusalem was used to finance the building of the Coliseum in Rome, and slave labor was used for the construction.  The story presented here has some of the Jewish slaves dying in combat in the Coliseum.  There was a significant, somewhat integrated, Roman Jewish community during this time, and many slaves had their freedom purchased by members of that community.

On one wall was a fascinating quote from Seneca:

Among the other superstitions of civil theology, also found fault with the sacred things of the Jews and especially the Sabbaths, affirming that they act uselessly in keeping those seventh days whereby they lose through idleness about the seventh part of their life, and also many things which demand immediate attention are damaged.

Joyce and I both thought, “He just didn’t get it.”  By the third and fourth centuries C.E. burial practices were somewhat similar to those of the Romans.  Here’s a Jewish sarcophagus, inscribed in Greek:

There were massive Jewish catacombs, and there was a reproduction of those of Villa Torlonia where there had been 3000 burials:

According to the explanations in the museum, during the Renaissance there was much exchange of intellectual ideas in Ferrara especially during the 15^th and 16^th centuries.  This is exemplified in the Cosime Tura portrait of the Virgin and Child with the Ten Commandments in Hebrew alongside her:

I had never heard of the scholar Isaac Lampronti, but I learned of him here and learned of his major work, Pachad Yitzchak” which was written here in Ferrara.

After our visit to the museum we wandered the medieval town (there was a good-sized flea market by the cathedral).  We had a delicious lunch in a lovely local restaurant, and unfortunately could not visit the cathedral, which was closed for renovation:

In the late afternoon we took another fast train back to Florence, packed up, and went to bed early to get up at 3 AM for the beginning of this day which has not gone as planned.  Next post from Jerusalem.