Summer vacation finds Angel touring sites in the Holy Land

A flower in the desert: it seems unusual that something so beautiful could flourish in the barren sands of the Middle East. But the picture of the flower in Marina Angel’s hand is proof that life goes on in the conflict-torn region.

Angel, a Temple law professor, spent the summer teaching a class on violence against women in the Middle East at Tel Aviv University, Israel. While there, she got to take a whirlwind tour of some real Middle Eastern hotspots—and that’s not to be taken lightly amid the current conflicts.

But, there she was, traipsing around the borders of southern Israel near the Promised Land—in taxicabs.

“There’s always cabs waiting on either side of the border,” she said, explaining that one passport clerk was perplexed when Angel said she was making her Middle Eastern trip over land.

“She got sarcastic with me and said, ‘Oh, are you going to rent a car and just drive around the Middle East?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m just going to take taxis,’” said Angel, laughing. “She looked at me like I was totally nuts!”

But Eilat, the Israeli port that sits between Jordan and Egypt, is only a few miles from either border because of where it sits at the top of the Red Sea.

“You take a cab to the border, and just walk across the Israeli-Egyptian border,” Angel said. “You’re right there at the Taba Hilton, where the peace talks were held [last winter].”

Angel used the Hilton as her base of operations as she explored St. Catherine’s, a fifth century monastery built on the believed site of Moses’ Burning Bush at Mount Sinai.

“In the old days it was terribly isolated,” Angel said. “Now it’s a three-hour drive in an air-conditioned car.

“It has the finest library of ancient Christian manuscripts and the finest collection of Greek icons in the world,” Angel said. “I went to the liturgy at six in the morning where it was just me and the monks, by candlelight. It was mindboggling.”

She then went another 50 kilometers to the Feiran Oasis, another archaeological haven steeped in Christian history, where she spent three nights in a widow’s monastery.

“That was the original seat of the Archdiocese of Sinai,” explained Angel. “I was taken up to the top of the hill, where they have excavated nine early Greek churches.” She then returned to Israel, where she took a cab from the Egyptian border to the Jordanian border, crossing into Aqaba to visit several archaeological sites.

“It’s like all of Arizona and New Mexico in a short one day trip,” said Angel, flipping through her photographs to one of several beaming Jordanian girls. “They love having their pictures taken. Usually kids are shy about it, but these girls rushed up with big grins on their faces.”

Jordan is reputed to be the place where Moses pointed out the Promised Land, Angel noted.

“There’s desert all around you, and you look down the mountain, and you see the Jordan Valley – and it’s so green,” she said. “And you think, ‘this fits.’

“But then it is really bizarre when you’re passing Bedouin farmers herding sheep and run into a line of trucks carting stuff from Aqaba to Baghdad,” she added.

She flew via Istanbul to Damascus, where she immediately felt the change in atmosphere. Angel is well traveled, having lectured or taught in locations such as Greece and Australia, and she is very familiar with the regional politics, so she wasn’t caught completely off guard.

“It’s a dictatorship,” said Angel, who noted that other dictatorships also “feel” the same when you cross their borders. “There’s a nervous energy that you can see on people’s faces.”

The high point of that trip was a second century synagogue that had been excavated and moved into the National Museum of Damascus.

“It had something you don’t see in other synagogues: representational scenes from the Old Testament. And, it had absolutely spectacular Greco-Roman floor mosaics.”

She found a woman guide in Damascus who seemed fairly liberated, but Angel noticed the culture clash when they actually set out.

“It turned out that she was very timid, and she didn’t know how to walk in a crowd,” said Angel, who noted that she didn’t really see that many women on the streets. “I mean, I’m from New York, and I was uncomfortable—but I was still a block ahead of her half the time.”

From Damascus, they headed into Tyre, Lebanon, which is still recovering from the civil war that dogged the country during the ’80s. On the one hand, bullet holes in buildings remind visitors of that all-too-recent past, and on the other, rock concerts are held at ancient sites.

“I’ve got pictures of the technicians setting up [for an Elton John concert] in this destroyed hippodrome,” Angel said. “Underneath, there are beach chairs sitting up against ancient walls.

“These sites were absolutely incredible. One had monoliths that weighed 240 tons. How on earth they managed to move them—it was an amazing engineering feat.”

Another Lebanese archaeological site in the Bekaa Valley had a long row of steps.

“These are not separate steps,” Angel said. “It’s one big chunk of marble that they cut the steps into. It just blew me away.”

Since joining Temple in 1979, Angel has received the 1989 George P. Williams Award for Outstanding Teaching, the 1996 Philadelphia Bar Association Sandra Day O’Connor Award and the 1998 Pennsylvania Bar Association Anne X. Alphen Award.

The Center City resident is painfully aware that she was right under the nose of history past and present, as her students were quick to remind her one day as they ventured to a Tel Aviv shopping mall for coffee.

“They know it’s dangerous,” Angel said. “You try not to take unnecessary chances, but you’ve got to live, too.”— Helen H. Thompson