Shabbat in a cupboard

It never fails to surprise me how often you can bump into someone you know here. So I was more than a little taken aback to bump into on old schoolfriend - Alastair - in a swimming pool in Tel Aviv, one random Friday when I was covertly smuggled into the salt-water swimming pool of the Oober posh Tel Aviv Hilton.

I arrived at the Hilton a full 24 hours later than I would have liked - my friends were staying on the 12th floor, overlooking the British Embassy, which just the day before was stormed by Commandos after a Palestinian jumped the fence - with a (what later turned out to be fake) gun, demanding asylum in Britain. I'm not in the mood for a political essay - but it's an interesting story worth looking up on the internet - it emphasises some of the divides and difficult situations the conflict is causing here.

The British Embassy was stormed by Commandos after a Palestinian jumped the fence

Anyhoos, the reason I was in Tel Aviv in the first place was to get a bus to Beit Shemesh, a city outside Jerusalem, where I was going to be staying with Danny Epstein (an emigrant from Manchester), and his family.

Beit Shemesh is an area of curiosity for me; most of it is very new - probably built in the last 20 years at most; the particular area I was staying in was an entire village created in a space of months, but now fully formed, with schools, parks, shops, bus stops - the whole works. It's a modern Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood, and as such the entire place comes to an absolute standstill on Shabbat. But as we walked on Friday night to synagogue, I realised that something wasn't quite right - although hundreds of people were making their way to shul, our significant walk led us to the basement of a family home, where thirty or so men and women squashed into a tiny area.

It seems that one of the responsibilities of the government when planning new neighbourhoods is to anticipate the demography of the future population, planning religious installations, the level of observance of schools, the operation of public services etc, in accordance with the people using them. Beit Shemesh was planned as a secular area - on the assumption that it was cheap land outside Jerusalem - the more religious would move into Jerusalem, and the poorer new immigrants would settle outside. How wrong they were! The council planned for approximately 300 synagogue seats in the vicinity, with a population of closer to 3000 relgious people. Now, it has fallen to the population to deal with the situation, buying up land earmarked for other things, to built more adequate syngagoues.

It's a big step for people to move here. Rabbi Danny Epstein, himself in his twenties, with his young wife and two children, survive on the income from his teaching in a Yeshiva (religious college), in Jerusalem. Time and time again, I meet people who could have a much wealthier life in the UK, but who sacrifice that for the quality and happiness of life in Israel.

Anyway, after much hopping between different syngagoues during the course of shabbat, and much eating and sleeping, I headed back to Jerusalem; where, surprise surprise, I bumped into two former students from Manchester University, a girl from my gap year who lives on the same road in London as Talia, and the new staff of AJ6, a charity I used to volunteer for.

It feels like a long time since I was in the hospital - I'm hoping that I'll be able to write something more pertinent to medicine tomorrow!