Last night, there was a private party in the dining room, but the hotel staff cooked up a small dinner just for me in the breakfast room. I had a plate of rice with chicken, carrots, and other unknown vegetables, flavored with middle-eastern spices. Also included was the ubiquitous plate of feta cheese, cherry tomatoes, and dark-green cucumbers, a roll with sesame seeds (comes with every meal - breakfast, lunch, and dinner), and some pretty disgusting spice-and-mint fruitcake with chocolate sauce. Everyone who works in this hotel is Arab, so while I was eating my Arabic food, I could hear enthusiastic Arabic conversation from the kitchen. The hotel is owned by the Church of Scotland, and the breakfast room is full of giant photographs of Scottish landscapes (see photo, upper left). To top it off, the private party in the dining room next door was an evangelical Christian community (from somewhere in Israel; they were dressed like Amish or Seventh-Day Adventist) holding a wedding reception, and they were belting out hymns in English throughout my meal. Their children were running around chattering to each other in German.
In sum: I am here in Jerusalem, but there is definitely not much Jewish going on around my hotel. The other night, an American-Israeli woman came to meet a friend in the cafe here, and she reported to me that the waiter refused to speak to her in Hebrew and persisted in speaking English with her. I see this man every day, he is Arab-Catholic (always complaining about the long hours he puts in at the Franciscan church; I'm not completely clear what he does), and he is always boasting that he can speak eith languages, one of them (of course) Hebrew. Everyone here can speak Hebrew, but when it's just the staff, they revert to Arabic. I'm not sure at all what was going on with this guy that he would refuse to speak Hebrew to this woman, because I've never experienced him to be anything but helpful and friendly (in English and in Hebrew). Unfortunately, I couldn't understand enough of their conversation to really glean what was going on. She told me that this place is considered to be part of the Old City, which is a decidedly Arab part of Jerusalem (in terms of residents, at least), even though the hotel is located outside the city walls. Maybe so, but I'm not so sure that it means much in terms of how the staff treats Jewish customers. (update: This seems to be a pretty popular place for locals to come on Thursdays for the buffet, and I've met some really nice Israelis here. I think the refusal-to-speak-Hebrew situation was largely a product of that woman's imagination and preconceived notions of the place.)
The main person in charge of this hotel is a very proper British woman (English, it seems from her accent, not Scottish) named Gwen (update: she is indeed Scottish, just lived in England for a time and I guess lost a bit of the accent). She keeps a low profile, and I only met her in order to discuss the fact that $10 per day for access to wireless internet for more than two weeks was outrageous, especially when no one told me this price when I asked about it several times over the past few months. So Gwen reduced it to $5 per day, which is fine, and then she disappeared back into her little office. (update: by the end of the trip, Gwen had proven to be super-helpful and very friendly.)
Today is Saturday, so everything is closed for the Sabbath: museums, shops, etc. Just down the hill from me is the Menachem Begin Heritage Foundation, which looks to be a very interesting museum and I think I'll check it out tomorrow. Begin (pronounced BAY-gin) was a leader of the pre-state organization Irgun, which was responsible for the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 91 people. He was a founder of the revisionist Zionist movement, which represented a major change from the original Labor Zionist (socialist) movement in terms of militarization of Israel, expansionist nationalist claims (i.e., we want all of the Holy Land), and expulsion of Arabs. Begin went on to become Prime Minister of the State of Israel in the conservative Likud (lit., "unity") party in 1977, a political shift that is only recently being corrected with the departure of Ariel Sharon from Likud and the creation of the more centrist Kadima (lit., "forward") party,, which remained in power after the last election. To read more about Menachem Begin, go here. I'm very interested to see how his heritage is represented in this foundation museum.
Tonight, the plan is to go with Tova to a house church service of some of her evangelical Christian missionary friends. "They are always trying to make me a believer," she told me. "And I like Jesus very much, but really, I prefer to be Jewish. So I stay Jewish, and they don't seem to mind, and I come to the church and dinner on Saturdays." I'm looking forward to seeing what this is like.
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