A stop in Germany

A blog post by Adam. Melissa spent the nine-plus hour flight to Frankfurt watching four movies with a few breaks for eating and using the bathroom. She had been deprived of movies for months as we tried to save money for the trip, and so she had no choice but to devote all her energy to her tiny screen. Without sleeping for even a minute she was pretty tired when the plane landed (I, of course, got at least some sleeping in). Still, determined not to waste the full day in Frankfurt (we landed at 9:00 am and our flight to Tel Aviv didn't leave until 8:00 pm) we headed into town on the train.

We wandered for a while after some bad directions from a confident German - this was actually the third German we had encountered who provided erroneous directions. We eventually found our way to the historic center of the city where we had two hot dogs (i.e. frankfurters) and then moved on to the Frankfurt Jewish Museum.

Adam in the historic center of Frankfurt.

Melissa in the historic center.

The Jewish Museum was decent though we were both so tired we spent as much time sitting on the museum benches as did looking at the exhibits. They had an impressive collection of Judaica, though Melissa wondered where it had all come from. Was this the remnants of the Frankfurt Jewish community killed in the Holocaust? The final exhibit was a video on the founding of Israel which was fitting for us since we were headed to Israel, but seemed out of place at a German museum. Certainly very few Jews remained in Frankfurt after the war, and perhaps many of those that did remain moved to Israel. But some Jews stayed and there are still Jews in Frankfurt today - I met them when I was in Germany in 2006. When your museum about Frankfurt Jews ends with Israel rather than Frankfurt it seems the message is that Germany is no longer a place for Jews...this is sad for Germany and for the tens of thousands of Jews who call Germany home today.

As we pondered our experiences at the Jewish Museum in a half wake stupor, we made our way onto a Main River boat cruise where Melissa fell asleep within minutes and I didn't do much better.

We then returned to the Frankfurt airport, hiked from one end to another, waited for our plane and flew to Israel.