There were many moments when it hit me, many moments when it struck me that Israel is more than the markets and the hummus and the desert and the Dead Sea and the Western Wall and all the other sites. It's a comfort, a sense of familiarity, of belonging and peace. I felt very safe in a space that is portrayed in the media as a war zone, in a land that once seemed so foreign to me. I didn't see a war zone or feel like I was far away. Instead, I saw and felt something else, something that connected me to Israel in a way that I wasn't expecting. I remember looking out of the airplane window and seeing the Jewish star imprinted on the plane, and I felt like even the plane was rejoicing in Judaism, that it was proud to be going home.

I recently returned from a Taglit-birthright trip to Israel which is a free, ten-day whirlwind tour of Israel for Jews aged 18-26 who have never been on an organized trip to Israel. We went everywhere–riding camels in the desert, hiking in the north, floating in the Dead Sea and climbing up Masada at sunrise. We stepped foot in the building where Israel officially became a state and saw Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Tzefat, and every other place along the way. Birthright advertises the trip as "the trip of a lifetime." I believe that it is not the actual trip that makes it so worthwhile, but it is what one takes away from it: single moments of revelation.

One of these moments occurred at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem. I studied the Holocaust and wrote academic papers about anti-Semitism. I have also read countless tales of survivors and seen the movies. What I hadn't done was feel it. That day at Yad Vashem, I began to feel it.

The whole structure of the memorial mimics the state of the Jewish population during those terrible years. The entrance of the museum is built so that it isn't even attached to the ground. It hovers over the side of a cliff, reflecting the fact that there was no foundation for the Jews. The rooms in the exhibit grow narrower as one walks deeper into the museum and the floors sink in, representing the darkening situation for the Jews.

My feet felt heavy as I moved from room to room, looking at the pictures and the artifacts and listening to the audio players on which survivors told their stories. It was a lot to take in, maybe too much. I felt cold, like I needed sunlight. Sometimes all it took was a single picture, or a single letter in a case to a loved one, a single map of a concentration camp to pierce my heart. I remember one artifact was particular painful to behold; It was a pair of small, broken wire-rimmed glasses. Our guide told us in a soft voice that she met the owner of those glasses–an elderly woman who had been crying on the museum steps on a beautiful afternoon just a few weeks back. When asked if she was all right, the elderly woman responded that the glasses were all she had left of her mother who had died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. I looked at the glasses through the display case and cried silently. I still can't forget those glasses, the way they rested there, broken.

As I passed through the exhibits, the rooms widened and the floors slanted upwards. However, somber reflection and tears filled each room. The small talk among our group ceased and it seemed as if everyone in our group was lost in his or her own thoughts. I felt small and insignificant inside Yad Vashem.

The last room of the exhibit represented the future of the state of the Jews. I walked down a small hallway and found myself at the edge of a huge glass wall. As I walked closer to the glass wall, I realized it overlooked Jerusalem. The city sprawled out beneath the window stretching as far as my eye could see. I could see the Dome, the houses, the hills, the Wall. And I breathed it in. I started to cry, and felt as though my tears dipped past the glass wall separating me from Jerusalem and I was right there, in the future of the state of the Jews. The only words that I could think of were Yerusalayim shel Zahav, Jerusalem of Gold. It is a golden city that will forever be a holy place. That moment of realization will remain with me always, reminding me that this city exists for every Jew in the world–a Golden City that connected me to Israel, our difficult history and most importantly our future, which looks as golden as the sun that sparkled over Jerusalem that afternoon.