By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO—At “Generations Day” on Tuesday, April 20, when parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents trooped to Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School to learn with their school children, this year’s lesson figured to be a snap. As the day corresponded with Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, the teachers decided the all-school lesson should be about something Israeli. They chose to teach us all about the eight gates to the Old City of Jerusalem.
“Each of the gates has a set of specific history,” Rabbi Simcha Weiser, the school’s headmaster, said. But there are traditions also. For example, the Golden Gate also is called Sha’ar HaRachamim, “The Gate of Mercy,” and by tradition that is the gate that the mashiach, the messiah, is supposed to come through.
Another gate with a great tradition is the Jaffa gate, through which Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria made his entrance into Jerusalem in 1898. “What they figured out was that with him sitting on his horse and wearing a pointed crown that he would be just a few inches too high to go through the gate. They had a choice: should the Emperor have to bow down when he enters Jerusalem or not? So before he came stone masons cut a groove all the way through the gate, and they lined it up precisely so if his horse walked in line, he could sit erect in his saddle and not have to bow his head when he entered Jerusalem.”
Back when members of my generation went to college, we typically used mnemonics to remember lists of persons or places. This typically involved taking the words in a list and, using their first letters, substituting for them words that could be combined into an easily remembered phrase or sentence. Wikipedia cites one of the best known examples. How do you remember all the colors of the rainbow? By remembering the colorful and non-existent “Roy G. Biv” whose name stands for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet.
Forgive my journalistic background, but I took the initials of the Jaffa, Golden, Herod, New, Zion, Lion’s, Damascus and Dung Gates and transformed them into a silly headline mnemonic: “’Jerusalem’s Gates Have Names,’ Zionist Liberators Do Declare.”
From materials prepared by the teachers, we learned that:
–The ‘Jaffa Gate leads from Jerusalem to the ancient port of Jaffa (now part of Tel Aviv)
–The ‘Golden Gate’ isn’t in San Francisco; it’s the one that Jewish tradition says will swing open when the Mashiach comes. It’s also known as the Gate of Mercy.
‘Herod’s Gate is named for the Roman-era king who built various additions near the Second Temple. As this particular gate wasn’t built for nearly two millennia after Herod, it’s name is honorific rather than historical.
The ‘New,’ Gate the tallest of the eight gates surrounding Jerusalem. It has a design unlike the other seven gates.
‘Zion,’ Gate is the main gate into the old city of Jerusalem.
Lion’s Gate is topped with four figures of lions looking toward the Mount of Olives.
‘Damascus’ Gate leads toward Damascus via Shechem (today Nablus).
The ‘Dung,’ Gate was the one upon which Arabs heaped garbage to shield it from the view of Jews seeking to pray at the Western Wall. It is the closest gate to Ha Kotel.
Soille elementary school students were exposed to a non-mnemonic type of pedagogy on Tuesday. Hebrew language teachers Liat Alon, Lihi Spirer and Anat Levi Fisher and other members of the faculty teamed up with middle school students also known as “the older kids” and my daughter, balloon artist Sandi Masori to program memorable activities in front of imaginative balloon sculptures representing each gate.
At the Jaffa gate, the elementary students assembled jigsaw puzzles. At the Golden gate, made from golden balloons which swung out to the future promised by the Messiah, they found sweets and played a game called “the Mashiach is coming.” At Herod’s gate (also known as the flower gate), they made flowers out of Fruit Rollups and Twizzlers. At the New gate, they tasted what for many of them was something new, an “Arab bagel” spread with labane and zaatar.
At the Zion gate, they watched a movie and wrote short notes about how they feel to be Jewish onto paper Stars of David. At the Lion’s gate, the children saw a movie about the retaking of the Kotel in the 1967 ‘Six Day War’ and wrote notes for HaShem. At the Damascus Gate, which has many beautiful designs, the children decoded messages that used designs. And at the Dung gate, the students went through ‘garbage pails’ filled with cut up paper, seeking a picture of the gate.
Daughter Sandi, owner of Balloon Utopia, said to create the balloon gates, she went online to look up the meaning and alternative names of the gates in English, “and then tried to interpret the gate with the balloons.” Construction of the eight large sculptures took three days.
“Some of them were really easy because Herod’s Gate is also known as the ‘flower gate,’” Masori said. “The Golden Gate (also known as the Gate of Mercy) had two moving gates to show that it will open … The New Gate was a crazy Art Deco kind of design. It was the most recent gate built by the Ottomans. I didn’t try to match their architecture but instead to interpret it . I thought the Art Deco look would be a more modern look, and thus ‘new.’ The ‘Dung gate’ was brown and misshapen and had a trash can in front of it. The Jaffa gate was supposed to be a gate of prayer, so on ribbons there were wishes that some of the older students and the teachers wrote…. The Lion’s Gate had the heads of lions on them…”
Generations Day and Yom Ha’Atzma’ut coincidentally fell on the ninth birthday of Soille third grader Shor Masori, our grandson. “My favorite gate was the ‘Golden Gate,’” he said. “It looked the coolest and it could do the most. It was the color of gold, Mashiach will come through it, and it is moveable.”
At Soille’s preschool, which a younger grandson, Sky, 3, attends, the little ones sang a welcome, pretended to fly to Israel, sang ‘happy birthday’ to Israel and in recognition of the fact that it is a “mitzvah” to plant a tree in Israel, potted flowers and painted the flower pots.
Watching Shor and Sky show off their learning, the other generations of our family–their parents, Sandi and Shahar, grandparents Nancy and yours truly, and great-grandpa Sam, couldn’t help but kvell.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World