A lighting short visit to Israel

A Letter from Martin Kessel

I am just back from a whirlwind one week visit to Israel mainly to visit our family there.

I arrived on Friday afternoon Nov. 7 and was soon whisked up to the to outskirts of Jerusalem for a Shabbat dinner with our Jerusalem family. That included our two great-granddaughters now both a year and nine months old already walking and chatting.

On Shabbat I had a lovely visit with my two brothers and their wives in Herzliah.

Shabbat evening is the traditional time for the large gatherings in Tel Aviv in support of the hostages and a peace agreement with Hamas. The gathering of several thousands of Israelis was particularly poignant as the 20 living hostages had just been miraculously returned to Israel, and the remains of hostages who had had died in the October 7 massacre, or in captivity, ,were slowly but surely being brought home. In fact, two of the living hostages spoke at the gathering – it was extremely emotional to be in the presence of people who had survived two years of extreme captivity.

My next few days were spent visiting the different members of our family one of which was in Rehovot.

Gail and I wrote several months ago about our experience during my stay at the Weizmann Institute of Science as a Visiting Scientist. Just a week after we left on the 7 May Weizmann suffered two direct hits by Iranian ballistic rockets which destroyed two large buildings which housed research laboratories. Amazingly the attack occurred in the middle of the night and no one was injured.  I met with one of the Professors, Oren Schuldiner, whose lab was destroyed,  who told me in detail of his lab’s devastating loss of decades of scientific research. As a scientist myself I could totally appreciate what had happened. Fortunately the people affected have now been relocated in temporary lab space and work can continue. But the physical damage is only part of the story as everyone has been very much affected by trauma from the missile attack. This will take a long time, if ever, to recover from.

My short visit to Israel ended with a two day stay at Kibbutz Kalia located at the northern end of the Dead Sea. Stunning Judean desert scenery, coupled with the Dead Sea itself and a spectacular view of the country of Jordan to the East. A perfect location for a family gathering of 24 of us. The two babies in the picture are our two great-granddaughters.

Thanks to modern transport it only took 18 hrs from Ben Gurion Airport to Boston Logan and by bus to Littleton, NH!!