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New tricks for an old town
Community blooms as history, geology and adventure attract tourists
BAIU LAZARUS STAFF REPORTER
About halfway between the holy city of Jerusalem and the seaside resort city of Eilat lies Mitzpe Ramon, an urban phenomenon that almost defies explanation.
Built in the 1950s when the first road linking Tel Aviv to Eilat was constructed, Mitzpe Ramon should have disappeared when a newer road was built further to the north.
A roOTi will a view: Tto MHziwRaflMmVisitoR' CsDtTQ owtooks ttw vait NMditati Ramon in tin middta of ttw Nagev Desert
houses and a youth hostel as well as hiking, jeep rides, camping and and cliff rappelling, Mitzpe Ramon is beginning to grow. It has become one of the most popular "ofi'-tlie-beaten-path" tourist ■ destinations in the Negev.
Mitzpe Ramon, which means "overlooking Ramon," was built on a cliffoverlooking the Makht-esh Ramon (Ramon Crater) in the Negev Highlands. Not real-
base fiiom which to take day trips to other sites. Only a few minutes drive along Highway 40 is Avdat National Park where the remains of houses, churches and fortresses of old Nabatean spice traders are found.
Further north is Sde Boker where David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, lived. (A museum in his home still shows his slippers by the bed.) Prime Min-
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The town, after all, grew out of a labor camp for the road builders and acted as a rest stop for south-bound travellere. Since it was situated in the middle of the desert, there was nothing known at the time that woidd attract visitors to the area and there was no agriculture to speak of to keep residents there. Once the first road was finished, people started to leave. The town of almost 7,000 shrunk to a mere few thousand inhabitants.
But after independence came exploration. Scientists and researchers began pushing fiirther south into the Negev from Tel Aviv and began to find geological formations worth talking about
First it was mining—day and gypsum brought people back to the area through the 1960s and 70s.
Now, it's tourism.
With a brand-new, state of the art visitors' centre, a hotel renovated from the apartments of the road workers and miners, guest
ly a crater, a makhtcsh is a geological formation where the movement of an underground river, combined with shifting tectonic plates produce a valley vrith high cliffs on either side. The exposed rock layers are believed to be 200 million years old and provide a mecca for geological explorers and nature-lovers alike.
The visitors' centre in the tovra offers a 15-minute video presentation explaining the process that formed the malditesh. It also offers displays of the geology, animals and vegetation of the area, as well as a relief model showing the physical layout of the crater.
A few steps from the centre is a ma^iificent view of the makht-esh. Tours give visitors the op-portimity to hike or rappel down the crater, trek across it, or camp on its floor.
But the makhtesh is only one of the attractions that is now drawing visitors from aroimd the world. Easily accessible by car, Mitzpe Ramon is often used as a
ister Ben-Gurion believed the Negev was where the future of Israel lay, both in terms of the development of land, as well as in terms of building character. He eventually retired to Sde •Boker with his wdfe Paula.
Within an hour's drive from Mitzpe Ramon is Revivim, Gol-da Meir's kibbutz, where tourists can visit the Golda archives and learn about the first Jewish settlements in the Negev.
For a more adventurous experience, they can follow part of the Nabatean spice route which ran 1,600 kms. from Petra, in what is now Jordan, through the Negev, to ports on the Mediterranean. By day, tourists can visit ruins of Nabatean cities dating back to the third century BCE. At night they can sit around camp fires drinking tea just as the Nabateans did thousands of years ago. □
For more information, contact the Mitzpe Ramon Visitors' Centre at (07) 658-8691.
Caiieb Downey-Brown (ieft) and Noa Berrin Reinstein, daugliter of Emmanu-EI Rabbi Victor Reinstein, liglit yahrzeit candles for IVfartin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Realization of a dream
Victoria residents walk for nonviolence and justice to honor two ground-breakers.
SUZANNE KORT SPECIAL TO THE BULLETIN Victoria
More than 500 people walked together beneath overcast skies from Victoria's city hall to nearby Congregation Emanu-El synagogue Sunday afternoon, Jan.18.
The Walk for Justice and Nonviolence, which stopped traffic across two busy downtown streets, marked the 25th yahrzeit (anniversary of ones death) of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Hesdiel and the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. At the walk's endj the record crowd packed the synagogue and overflowed into the portable next door.
A photograph of Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King at an American civil rights march in the 1960s stood on the bimah at the front of the synagogue. Beside the photo sat two yahrzeit candles that children from \^ctoria's black and Jewish commimities lit while many present sang Oseh Slialom (Let There Be Peace).
The program, often punctuated by peace songs in English and Hebrew, began with a tape of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, originally delivered to 250,000 people in Washington, D.CJ. in 1963. In the first few lines of his impassioned speech, the cele-
brated Nobel laureate longed for the day his children would be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.
Dr. King was bom Jan. 15, 1929, in Alabama to a family of Baptist ministers and dvil ri^ts leaders, and was assassinated April 4,1968, in Tennessee.
He consistently met violent opposition to his stand against racist laws with nonviolent protest.
Rabbi Heschel was bom in Poland on Jan. 11, 1907, to a family of Chassidic rabbis and died in New York City on Dec. 23, 1972 (18 Tevet, 5733). He called himself "a brand plucked from the fires of the Holocaust."
Rabbi Heschel taught and wrote eloquently on Jewish ethics and mysticism.
His scholarly works inspired his social action, bom civil ri^ts to protests against the Vietnam war. Of his experience marching with Dr. King at Selma, Ala., Rabbi Heschel said, "I felt my legs were praying."
During the Victoria celebration, students from Maxwell International Baha'i School at Shawm'gan Lake performed spirited dances. One showed the tragic results when parents teach racist values to their children.
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