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Byline: Abigail Klein Leichman ISRAEL21C.ORG

Travel along Incense Route

Travel along Incense Route

A sculpture of camels traversing the Incense Route in Avdat National Park. (photo by Kate Giryes/Shutterstock.com)

Close your eyes and travel back in time 2,000 years. You’re riding on the back of a camel laden with frankincense and myrrh from faraway Yemen, navigating 100 kilometres across the harsh, hilly Negev Desert to get your precious cargo to the Mediterranean ports.

For 700 years, from the third-century BCE until the second-century CE, this was the hazardous but hugely profitable task of the nomadic Nabatean people. Today, the small Israeli portion of the 2,000-kilometre Incense Route – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – is a fascinating trail filled with beautiful desert vistas and archeological discoveries.

The route includes the remains of the Nabatean towns of Halutza, Mamshit, Avdat, Shivta and Nitzana (another, Rehovot-Ruhaibe, is hidden by sand dunes), four fortresses (Katzra, Nekarot, Mahmal and Grafon) and two khans (Moa and Saharonim). You can see evidence of surprisingly sophisticated watering holes, agriculture and viniculture that the Nabateans innovated.

“The Roman and Greek empires controlled a lot of cities around the Mediterranean shores and, in all these cities, there were pagan shrines where they sacrificed animals. The smell was terrible, so the Nabateans brought incense for those shrines to cover the smell of the slaughter,” explained tour guide Atar Zehavi, whose Israeli Wild tours specialize in off-the-beaten-track jeeping, cycling, hiking and camel-back trips like the Incense Route.

photo - At Moa, you can see an original pressing stone for olive oil
At Moa, you can see an original pressing stone for olive oil. (photo by Atar Zehavi)

“The route is surprisingly difficult because there were easier ways to go across the Negev. But the Nabateans wanted to stay hidden from other Arab tribes that might ambush the caravans, and they wanted to avoid being discovered by the Romans so they could keep their independence,” Zehavi said. “They knew how to harness the harsh desert conditions to their advantage, building water holes and strongholds others would not find. The Romans conquered Judea pretty easily but it took them another 150 years to conquer the Nabateans.”

Zehavi recommends a two-day “jeeping and sleeping” excursion along the Incense Route, also called the Spice Route. Start in the east, at Moa in the Arava Valley, site of an ancient khan (desert inn). From there, ascend the Katzra mountaintop, a stronghold overlooking the whole region. This will give you an appreciation for how hard it was to lead a caravan of camels up a steep slope.

“They’d travel 30 kilometres a day between khans. One camel carried 350 kilos of incense and only needed to drink once every 10 days or so,” said Zehavi, who has a master’s degree in environmental studies.

Even back then, camels wouldn’t have had much to drink at the third stop, the Nekarot River, a dry riverbed that once flowed through the Arif mountain range and northern Arava. The Nekarot is part of the Israel National Trail and boasts spectacular landscapes.

This leads you past Saharonim to the fourth stop, the town of Mitzpeh Ramon with its world-famous Ramon Crater (Makhtesh Ramon), which still has visible Nabatean milestones among its abundant flora and fauna, including the Nubian ibex. Ramon is the world’s largest erosion crater, stretching 40 kilometres and descending to a depth of 400 metres. It has unique geological structures, such as the Hamansera (Prism) of crystallized sandstones and the Ammonite rock wall embedded with fossils.

photo - An ibex at the Ramon Crater
An ibex at the Ramon Crater. (photo from PikiWiki Israel)

Camp out overnight in the crater, if weather and traveler preferences permit. A variety of hotels, from desert lodge to hostel to luxury, are also in the crater area. While in Mitzpeh Ramon, you may want to include the visitors centre and a nighttime stargazing tour.

The next morning, you’ll have a choice of trails for walking, jeeping or biking in the crater. A guided jeep tour is always a good option.

Getting back on the Incense Route, you go up Mahmal Ascent on the northern rim of the crater, a 250-to-300-metre climb to the Mahmal Fortress. Proceed northwest from there to Avdat National Park, site of a once-flourishing Nabatean city, where you can see shrines that were later turned into Byzantine churches.

Zehavi explained that, after the Roman Empire transitioned into Byzantine Christianity around 324 CE, incense was no longer needed, so the Nabateans started producing wine and desert agriculture, as well as raising Arabian horses.

“It’s amazing to see the way the harsh desert was colonized for agriculture through the use of highly sophisticated irrigation systems,” said Zehavi.

End your tour of the Incense Route at Avdat or go northwest to Shivta National Park and Halutza, or northeast to Mashit National Park near Dimona.

Israel21c is a nonprofit educational foundation with a mission to focus media and public attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. For more, or to donate, visit israel21c.org.

Format ImagePosted on April 21, 2017April 20, 2017Author Abigail Klein Leichman ISRAEL21C.ORGCategories TravelTags history, Incense Route, Israel, Israel National Trail, Nabateans
A platform for giving

A platform for giving

Naomi Brounstein, left, and Vivi Mann working on Ten Gav. (photo by Hindy Lederman via Israel21c.org)

In the Israeli port city of Ashdod, two families with blind babies were eager to take courses at the country’s sole training centre for parents of vision-impaired infants. But the centre is in Petah Tikva, a three-bus journey from Ashdod, and these families did not have cars. How could they get the specialized guidance they needed?

Their municipal social worker appealed to a new nonprofit, Ten Gav, a crowdfunding site for relatively small needs identified by Israeli social workers and vetted by the two volunteer founders. Following a successful campaign, a van was hired to transport the families to and from the training sessions.

The funding needs presented on Ten Gav never exceed $1,500, and every dollar donated goes directly to the chosen campaign, so even a small contribution counts large. Since December 2014, Ten Gav has fully funded 80 projects, among them a refrigerator for a destitute family, beds for new immigrants, an air conditioner for the bedroom of a child with cerebral palsy and a washing machine for an elderly woman.

The founders, Ra’anana residents Vivi Mann and Naomi Brounstein, are professional women with a soft spot for charitable endeavors. They wanted to find a worthwhile project they could start and run together. Mann is a management consultant and Brounstein – who is from Ontario – has degrees in law and social work.

“Vivi and I looked for challenges that needed to be faced, and we developed this model for the Israeli market based on similar sites operating in America,” Brounstein told Israel21c.

They began Ten Gav as an online crowdfunding platform to match donors with modest needs in Israel that cannot be funded by the state or existing charities. “We are very careful not to present stories where another organization can easily provide what is needed,” said Brounstein.

With startup capital from supporters including Joseph Gitler, founder and head of the Leket Israel national food bank, they began making contact with municipal social workers across Israel.

They weren’t quite ready to launch when the 2014 summer conflict with Hamas escalated into Operation Protective Edge, but a Canadian friend of Brounstein’s wanted to make an immediate donation to families affected by the rocket fire, and asked if she could do so through Ten Gav.

“So, we built our first site using Wix, as Vivi ran around to communities in the south to find needs from social workers,” said Brounstein. “Sderot social workers deal with a lot of elderly residents, and we filled a number of requests for air conditioners and washing machines. This was not a directly war-related need but, in times of uncertainty and insecurity, any help you give goes a long way in making people feel they are supported by others.”

After the ceasefire in late August, the women took Ten Gav offline until they truly felt ready to launch at the end of the year.

“Ten Gav is all about empowering donors to select the cases their money will go to, and empowering the recipient,” said Mann.

Many of the cases brought to their attention by social workers don’t fall under the rubric of traditional charity. For example, a social worker in one city thought that joining an afterschool soccer program would help two boys in therapy to release their aggression in a fun and disciplined manner, and that they would benefit from being part of a team. Since their parents could not afford the fee, Ten Gav raised it and the boys were able to join.

The two founders say they are impressed by the sensitivity and creativity of the welfare authorities they meet in each municipality. “They see things in homes that you and I do not see,” said Brounstein.

Sharon Friedman, a social worker in the Department of Youth at Risk of Jerusalem, describes Ten Gav’s assistance as “oxygen to breathe” for some of her clients. Among requests her office has submitted and that have been successfully crowdfunded are piano lessons for a girl whose family could not afford them, a ping-pong table for a child with social difficulties, an afterschool program for a child from a single-parent home and a computer to enable a woman to work from home.

Cheques are made out to the service providers and handed over by the social workers. All administrative costs are covered separately by grants from supporters such as the U.S.-based Good People Fund.

“We are looking to expand slowly so we can control the types of cases and level of due diligence we can do so our donors can always be confident their money is going to the right place,” said Brounstein.

Mann explained that the name Ten Gav was chosen for a few reasons. The expression loosely translates to “watch my back” and portrays the idea of helping out rather than handing over cash. “Everybody gives something and gets connected to a personal story, knowing their money won’t get lost in a big pool.”

For more information, visit tengav.org.

Abigail Klein Leichman is a writer and associate editor at Israel21c. Prior to moving to Israel in 2007, she was a specialty writer and copy editor at a daily newspaper in New Jersey and has freelanced for a variety of newspapers and periodicals since 1984. Israel21c is a nonprofit educational foundation with a mission to focus media and public attention on the 21st-century Israel that exists beyond the conflict. For more, or to donate, visit israel21c.org.

Format ImagePosted on December 4, 2015December 4, 2015Author Abigail Klein Leichman ISRAEL21C.ORGCategories World
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