RANSVESTIA

(except in tourist groups) because they are presumed to interfere with the men's devotions - this compares inversely with the comment of Amer- ican women that "men only have one thing on their mind” (and it isn't religion). We visited the Wailing Wall which is also divided into the men's and women's sections - maybe for the same reason. I walked down and into the women's section-where else-it was Yom Kippur and conse- quently very crowded.

That evening back at the hotel we heard the news of the outbreak of war. At first people thought it was just another skirmish but as I had brought along my little transistor radio I was able to pick up the Voice of America from Beirut and the BBC from London which made it clear that this was for real. I became the source of current news for our group. Sun- day morning we learned that Lod airport had been closed. We weren't due to leave the country for several days yet but it did begin to cast a cloud of concern over some of the group. In the afternoon we drove in private cars to Haifa-taxis and buses were busy with troops. We watched a number of tanks winding down the streets on the road to the Jordanian front from which we had come just 3 days before. On the road to Haifa we found groups of soldiers at intersections hooking rides to join their units; groups of white-coated people in front of the hospitals, many of them high school girls, awaiting the arrival of casualties; and frequently along the road col- lections of trucks of all kinds stashed under groves of trees-transport awaiting assignment; and convoys on the roads. Never having been in the middle of a war before it was sort of exciting and fearful at the same time. We of course had no idea what was going to happen either to the country or to us with the airport closed. Anyway we arrived at our hotel in Haifa on the slopes of Mt. Carmel in the middle of an air raid alert and were ordered into the basement garage to await the all clear before we could go to our rooms. There was another in the middle of the night but I didn't get out of bed for it.

Next day we took a ride up the coast to the Lebanese border which was quiet. There was an Israeli television crew there and they got us to line up by the border barrier and interviewed us as to whether we were fright- ened, etc. We weren't and said so and that we were being very well taken care of in Israel, etc. We learned later from letters from the states that the film had been shown on US-TV and friends of tour members had seen it and written. We had lunch at a kibbutz and were shown around it- including their bomb shelters - we were only about 40 miles from the fighting on the Golan Heights. The whole war made me so damn mad. Here was Israel where everybody was working and building and in which