Last week we spent the week learning about the Holocaust. On Tuesday there was a Holocaust survivor who talked to us, then after we had class with a break for lunch, then we had night class. This sucked because in addition to having to learn about the Holocaust I was not able to see my cousin who was in Israel for only 1 week because I was not allowed to miss this class. On Wednesday we went to Lochamei Haghettaot which is a museum about the Ghetto fighters, out of the whole week Lochamei Haghettaot was the only museum that I liked. I liked it the most because it upset me the least. That night we watched the movie “Escape from Sobibor” it was interesting, but it left me in a bad mood after watching it. Thursday was the Jewish fast day of Ta’anit Esther and it also happened to be the day that we went to Yad Vashem which is the main Holocaust museum.

Learning about the Holocaust always really stinks, but learning about it here was even worse. Because for literally 1 week all we learned about was the Holocaust, for 13 hours a day we learned about people who wanted us to die. It was really depressing.

Personally I am effected by the Holocaust because 3 of my 4 grandparents are survivors.

Yesterday we found out that for the next week will be giving presents to each other. It is kind of like secret Santa in the sense that we do not know who is giving us the present. In Hebrew it is called הגמד והעוך (the dwarf and the giant). Today, tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday we are giving presents to each other. On Friday we are supposed to make a mishloach manot for our person and give it to them and tell them who we are. I have all ready given my person their present for the day, I have not gotten mine yet, but hopefully I will get it soon. 

While IE8 has some really neat features, I had a few problems with the beta. My main problem was how it rendered pages. Many pages that worked correctly on IE7 have extra spaces between lines and have messed up tables. Also my other problem was that when ever I tired to open a page from my local zone it would open in the same window as the pages in my web zone and it would also cause my web zone window to crash.

On Thursday (last week) I went to Bet Hashomer and the Lebanese/Israeli border. Now the question that you are asking yourself now is most likely “Nate, why were you near the Lebanese border?” Well, I’ll get to that later.

So, at Bet Hashomer we learned about how the Jews organized groups of guards during the 2nd aliha. We also went out into a grass field and there our male counselor Etan showed us some knife moves that he learned in the army. After he showed us we got to try them out on each other. But for some reason they did not trust us with knifes so we had to use plastic spoons instead.

After that I went to go hiking next to Lebanon. The place that we went to was called Tanur Falls. It was this really nice water fall. Before we want hiking we learned about the border from our female counselor Orly. She taught us about how the border works and about how Hezbollah is the group in charge of the border. (Which explained why there was a Hezbollah flag on the other side)

Being on the border was kind of scary, but I felt safe because not only was our normal guard there but there was also a group of about 10 border soldiers in the area.

On Tuesday(last week) something kind of odd happened during core class. They brought both classes together and told us that we were to do a project about the type of Zionism. What did this project entail you ask. Well we had to make a song, skit, poster, and formal presentation for each type of Zionism. It reminded me of color war a bit.

After core we had our normal classes and then the fun began. From 17:00(5pm) until 23:00(11pm) I worked on the presentation, skit, song, and poster for my group. The Religious Zionism group.

After sleeping for about 9 hours I got up at 8:30(It was now Wednesday) and went out into my room’s outer room. On the wall was a paper that said something like “It is the day to go in the foot steps of the greats, follow where they lead”. So I walked out of the room and on the floor was paper footsteps leading down to the lower moadon, and in the lower moadon was a bagel breakfast that our counselor Orly had prepared for us.

After the breakfast I worked on the project until 2 at which point I went to the bet-kensent to give our presentation. We were the forth group to go, and one of 2 groups using a projector. The first group using the projector was only using it for their skit to show a movie that they had made. That made us the only group planning to use it for our presentation. The key word here is planning. Because when it was time to give the presentation I went to the projector and plugged in my laptop and turned on the presentation mode. And thankfully every thing worked amazing well because my laptop is built really well…..NOT! My laptop is a piece of &*%$ and of course when I plugged in my laptop I found out that the VGA output does not work. So my 5+ hours of work on the presentation were for nothing. But in the end we were fine without and got a 94% on the project, other people got between 92% and 100%.