Accessing Awe through Cultural Heritage in Israel
Heart of Heritage: A Family Tour of Israel
My primary interest in cultural tourism centers on the power of awe as it is an experience that lifts people beyond routine awareness. Living and studying in Israel, I encounter awe at sacred and ancient sites and in the presence that modern visitors bring with them. Awe, in this sense, is relational. It emerges from the meeting point of past, place, and person.
As founder of Yehudit Institute, I create opportunities for travelers to experience awe through heritage interpretation. Alongside history, I also study how individuals in our present moment imagine the future especially in light of ongoing geopolitical disruption.
My work in Pilgrimage Studies applies a vernacular approach, which means that faith need not be absorbed into political or commercial narratives. Instead, we treat belief as a key and life-affirming way of knowing. Today, pilgrimage is no longer only defined as travel to officially sacred places. I believe that people write their own history simply by where they care to go. This act of caring makes a travel tour, which could last a relatively short period of time, a matter of days or weeks, into something permanently meaningful for a lifetime. It also includes journeys to sites marked shaped by atrocity, trauma, or disaster. Traveling to these places can be an act of ethical witness and a civic statement affirming the human right to move freely and to return home.
People write their own history simply by where they care to go.
About Your Guide
Judy Wallace, a history scholar, wife and mother, and an English-speaking Olah in Israel, is a member of a complementarian Orthodox Jewish faith community. She brings to her work a background in education, business, and non-profits. She earned an MBA in 2002, then pursued further training in human development and seminary-level interspiritual ways of knowing.
Her academic credentials include credentials in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Yeshiva University (2022) and national recognition as a Certified Interpretive Guide by the National Association for Interpretation (2023). She is currently working toward the advanced Heritage Interpreter designation, with a projected completion in 2025. As founder of a nonprofit established in 2012, now the financial and administrative sponsor of Yehudit Institute, Judy leads projects that vision a world where all people can travel and find home safely.
In her role as a cultural wisdom keeper, Judy guides others to a humane and faith-based worldview. Her interpretive framework values four awe-centered research actions: doing without forcing, listening without deciding, hoping without expecting, and going without resisting. These principles guide her contributions to see peace in Israel and all places around the world.
Heart of Heritage Family Tour of Israel
This 10-day hub-and-spoke tour, based in Jerusalem, centers around the Inbal Hotel as a symbolic home base. From this hub, we venture out each day to different cultural and historical “spokes,” heritage sites throughout Israel, before returning in the evening. The tour is designed for families of complementarian expressions of Christian faith. Complementarian practice affirms spiritual equality while maintaining distinctions in family and communal roles. A journey to Israel for single adults, and married couples without or with their teens (ages 15 and up), offers all the richness of a vacation adventure to stir the spirit while placing at the heart of the experience the figure described in Proverbs as a woman of strength, “far above rubies.”
We will stay at the Inbal, a hotel and conference center near Liberty Bell Park, Jerusalem, Israel. Each morning and evening we will share time to hear the wisdom of women who lead from the heart of heritage in our tradition where clergy ordination is not their role. Destinations include the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, Machane Yehuda Market, Yad Vashem, and, on Shabbat, Family Camp at Mevo Modi’im, a rural village with musical and spiritual roots. With the help of an Arab-Israeli guide, we will also visit Christian sites such as Bethlehem, which are restricted to Jewish entry.
As a heritage interpreter living in Israel and practicing within a Jewish complementarian tradition, I bring warm hospitality to guide Christian families through an intrinsic experience designed to open space for awe.
Day 1 = Monday. Inbal Hotel Check-in
Day 2 = Tuesday. Western Wall Heritage Foundation Kotel Plaza
Day 3 = Wednesday. Abuhav Synagogue, Tzfat
Day 4 = Thursday. Ben-Gurion Heritage Institute
Day 5 = Friday. Mevo Modi’im, the Carlebach Moshav
Day 6 = Shabbat Programming. Family Camp at the Moshav
Day 7 = Sunday. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
Day 8 = Monday. Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem
Day 9 = Tuesday. Neot Kedumim Biblical Landscape Reserve
Day 10 = Wednesday. Departure Travel Day
About the Author: Judy Wallace. As an Orthodox Jewish woman, my personal faith guides my life, even as I study the history of religion with academic rigor. Distinguishing between religious belief and cultural context helps clarify the motivations behind my research. I strive for objectivity in my scholarship, though my humanity and faith naturally inform the questions I ask and the way I interpret historical evidence.
Note that I’m approaching the New Testament material as a source of Christian heritage but not from personal Christian faith.