Friday, Sept 28th. Today we visited the Roman/Byzantine Ruins at the Bet Sha’an National Park, just outside the city of Bet Sha’an, which is about 200 km north of Jerusalem at the northern tip of the West Bank. I was a two-hour drive through the desert.

Bet Sha’an is another busy, relatively modern city. The ruins at the national park were amazing.  It was a very, very hot day – over 40 (that’s degrees Celsius); i.e., over 100 F, so we rented a golf cart to more easily see everything.

The park is over 400 acres of an archeologists’ dream. At the center is a Tell (a mound of earth several hundred meters high, which contains within the remnant of ancient cities yet to be unearthed) that they estimate contains evidence of civilizations from the late Neolithic period, i.e. as early as 6000-5000 BCE).  Archeological evidence indicates that the Tell was occupied continuously until the late Early Bronze Age and then resumed in the early Bronze Age III.  The Tell was there when the Romans occupied the area in ~ 500 BCE  and they put their temple on the top of the hill and designed their city around it. The city and the temple on top of the Tell were excavated initially in the 1920s by archeologists from Penn State and then a new dig began in the 80s by archeologists from Hebrew University. It is an active dig today. Mount Gilboa is not too far from here and was the site of a great battle between the Philistines and Israelites (under King Saul). The Israelites lost and King Saul was killed. His body was displayed on Bet Sha’an walls. King David eventually took the location. Each new reign destroyed the old city and built a new one on top of the ruins. We went through the park and took some terrific photos, a few of which are given below.

Entrance to the park

View of the Roman Cardo

View from the entrance

Remnents of a Roman Bath house

View of the Tell from a shady vantage point (Carol just doused herself with water from a fountain).

Roman amphitheater (top: note the box seats – cave-like at the top)

Note the stage (left). Concerts are held here during the summer.

Carol cooling off in the shade and pondering the ruins

Despite the heat we thoroughly enjoyed this place. It is amazing to ponder the way people lived here over the millennia.

A few weeks ago we visited the German Colony neighborhood of Jerusalem. On the way we checked out the famous King David Hotel and the Jerusalem YMCA. The YMCA is particularly impressive. It was built in the late 1920s and designed by Arthur Louis Harmon, the same architect who designed the Empire State Building. Its mission is to foster international peace and unity for people of all faiths and ethnicities. The façade is stately with an impressive front which bears an inscription in three languages (Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic, representing the three Abrahamic religions). The lobby is very elegant. To the right is a grand sitting room. On the walls are painting from local artists. At the top of the building there is a tower with four balconies, each facing a different direction. The views from the tower are simply amazing. The photo below is just one – of the Old City’s southern wall.  On the way down from the tower we passed the Tower Bells, which chime periodically.

Jerusalem YMCA front

Reception area ceiling

YMCA tower in the front of the building

One view from the tower

Tower bells – gift from the UK

We then crossed the street to the King David Hotel, another grand building. We took a quick walk through the reception area and onto the veranda, which is an elegant outdoor restaurant with a view of the Hotel’s pool.

Rear view of the King David from the veranda

View of the King David pool

Just behind the hotel down several flights of stairs one comes upon a beautiful community called Yemen Mose (pronounced mosha). Before 1967, this area, which is within a stone’s throw of the Old City Wall, was under heavy gunfire from the Jordanians who controlled the Old City during the war.  The area became a wasteland of dilapidated houses — a slum. After the six-day war, the government gave permission to people and artisans to occupy the area providing that they rebuild the homes and revitalize the area. That they did with artist studios, a music institute and art galleries. To walk these streets and alleys is to walk in a wonderland.

Our walk through Yemen Mose

A few weeks ago, we visited a highly touted local cheese farm – Shai Seltzer Goat Farm. Many in the region covet this cheese. The owner, Shai Seltzer, is a legend in Israel and is written up in all of the tour books as being a bit of a character; a genius with goats and cheese, standoffish to tourists and somewhat of a hermit. The farm was hard to find – it’s nestled inside a national forest and you have to follow the signs with a small goat on it. It’s like Seltzer doesn’t want anybody to know where his farm is located. But we did find it – up a narrow dirt road that looks like it’s going nowhere. Than we noticed the goat pens built into the hillside and a number of old wooden outbuildings.  It was interesting; and we’re venturesome, so we meandered up the hill past the goat sheds to the “store.”

Whoa, what a store. It’s carved out of the rock of the mountain with one table and one small counter with a refrigerated cheese display. Another couple was just finishing up their purchases. The couple behind the counter was Seltzer’s son and daughter-in-law. They had a half dozen or so cheeses to offer as samples – from the soft to the very hard (aged 2-years). Taste? Each morsel was a burst of flavor; nutty, creamy, pungent, semi-sweet, sweet, earthy …… As we were buying what we liked (actually we liked them all) who but Mr. Seltzer comes wandering into the cave (I mean store). In the first two minutes of our encounter, he lived up to his reputation. He was thin, tanned, about 65-75 and sported a long snow white beard, wore a white tunic and white cap (sorry, no photo). As he was talking to his son, Carol mentioned that we admired his goats and had read that they were the offspring of a male goat from Virginia. Suddenly his demeanor changed. We talked about his goats, their lineage, what kind they were (Anglo-Nubian), how his wife learned goat husbandry in Charlottesville (She was born in the US (Shai might have been too) and did her undergraduate work at Bryn Mawr), etc. He even offered us a drink. After 10 or so minutes, off he went. Very strange, very interesting, very very good cheese!

Carol at a table in the store

Carol admiring the goats

The son packaged the cheeses in waxed paper and aluminum foil so they would stay cool as we headed back to Jerusalem (about a 45 minute ride). On the way out of the farm we stopped to photograph the ancient olive trees by the side of the road.

Two customers buying cheese

Very old olive trees on the way to (from) the goat farm

Our blog posts (and emails to family and friends) have been more infrequent lately; in part due to work as well as taking an amazing tour in the north of Israel this past weekend (more on that in a future post).  For those of you who might be interested in the work – what follows is a brief description of why we are in Israel.

I’m interested in applying accurate quantum mechanical techniques to the characterization of molecules in alternative sources of energy such as oil sand and oil shale.  I’m in Israel, in Sason Shaik’s lab, to better learn a technique called Valence Bond Theory. After spending the first few weeks reading the literature (and keeping up with the work my research students are doing in Richmond!), I’ve decided to use VBT to characterize the bonding in the benzyne series:

The first step is to use Rumer’s Rules and the Weyl formula to figure out how many possible spin-paired structures (basis functions) are possible, including all covalent and ionic structures.  There are a lot!  If we focus just on the pi and sigma radical electrons/orbitals (8 electrons distributed in 8 orbitals) – there are 14 covalent structures and 1750 ionic structures (I’m going to try to write a mathematica script to auto-generate the ionic structures!)  These structures are then used in a variational way, minimizing the energy by adjusting the weights of each structure, and from this we can determine which structures are most important, thus obtaining a very detailed picture of the bonding.  I plan to construct different basis sets in order to assess, in each benzyne,  the 1.) importance of sigma and pi bonding in the ground and excited states, 2.) coupling between the sigma and pi orbitals and 3.) amount and nature of through-space and through-bond coupling.

A week or so ago, we rode our bikes up a nearby hill to visit the national military cemetery at Mount Herzl.  This is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful and sentimental memorial cemeteries we’ve ever seen. It was a vast area of many acres. The combination of gravesites, trees, flowering bushes, marble monuments, stone walkways, open patios, benches, plaques and so forth, was not only inspiring, but also emotionally wrenching.

A small burial section of the cemetery

A typical path through the cemetery

The cemetery is named after Theodor Herzl, who is considered to be the father of modern Zionism, i.e. the need and desire for Jews to have their own homeland so as to be free from anti-Semitism. Herzl died in 1904 in Vienna, 44 years before the establishment of the State of Israel. His will stipulated that he have a simple funeral, without flowers or speeches, yet 6000 people attended. He was originally buried in Vienna and in 1949 his remains were reburied on Mount Herzl, overlooking Jerusalem.

Herzl’s tomb