janeandbobandmore: TUVIABOOK.COM

TUVIA BOOK & THE ETHIOPIAN TICKET TAKER

Tuvia Book tuviabook.com was our licensed private guide the first week we were in Israel. Dr. Book was born in England and raised both in the UK and South Africa. After making Aliya to Israel at age seventeen and studying in yeshiva, he volunteered for the IDF where he served in an elite combat unit.

Not wanting to spend his days sitting in an office facing a computer, Tuvia pursued a PhD in Education. He has been guiding groups for Birthright Israel since its beginning and serves as Director of Education for Write On for Israel. With a doctorate in education, Tuvia has served in a variety of roles -- as a shaliach (emissary), a lecturer, an author, etc. His knowledge of Israel, its history, archaeology and the Bible (his father is a modern orthodox rabbi) is encyclopedic. Ruins speak to him --from the ancient Nabatean stones to those of Herod as part of the Temple Mount to the reconstruction of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter. With his boundless enthusiasm, he provided us with a great week driving as far south as the Negev and then north to Haifa, and finally walking through the Old City of Jerusalem where around every corner he helped us uncover something remarkable – an inscription, a lonely arch, a mosaic fragment -- to which he gave a fascinating background story.

Tuvia never missed an opportunity to illuminate the special meaning of Israel. In the Old City he led us into a remarkably layered archeological site -- a large Roman villa completely excavated beneath a yeshiva in the Jewish Quarter. Imagine the layers: modern YESHIVA on top, 2,000 year old ROMAN VILLA beneath. As we entered, we met the ticket taker, Yosef, a young Jewish fellow from Ethiopia. Tuvia conversed with him at some length in Hebrew, their common language. Together with 14,000 Ethiopian Jews, Yosef and his family were rescued by the IDF during Operation Solomon in 1991. He was one month old and saved from almost certain death from famine and/or civil war. Ethiopian Jews' relationship to Israel dates back to the 1^stTemple period—3000 to 2500 years ago. The Ethiopian community practiced a pre-Rabbinic form of Judaism. Yosef grew up in southern Israel, entered the IDF and was now making a new path for himself--- working, going to the University and shortly to be married. He and Tuvia clearly cemented close ties as combat veterans and were now talking now about their units in the IDF.

2,000 year old Roman villa excavated and open to tourists with modern yeshiva built above

This was just one of many encounters Tuvia made with other Israelis along our route. He developed a similar relationship with an Israeli student, a Christian Arab young woman, who guided us on our visit to the Technion. We later learned from Tuvia that she was a 4^thyear engineering and that her parents were both physicians at the Technion Medical Center/Hospital.

Tuvia proved to be very much a guide not only to the land of Israel but also to its people.