Daily Briefing: Archaeological Discoveries Bring Ancient Jerusalem to Life (December 6th, 2019)

To uncover a stepped street that served as a major route to the Jewish Temple 2,000 years ago, Israeli archaeologists and engineers are building what resembles a subway tunnel under a Palestinian neighborhood. Residents claim the dig has damaged homes above.

We are standing in a fifth-century church built to commemorate the site where Jesus is said to have cured a blind man near the Pool of Siloam. The sanctuary fell out of use, its roof eventually collapsed, and the ancient building over time joined the city’s vast underground realm.

For Uziel the church is more than cool. It’s also the latest complication in one of the world’s most expensive and controversial archaeological projects. His mission is to unearth a 2,000-year-old, 2,000-foot-long street that once conveyed pilgrims, merchants, and other visitors to one of the wonders of ancient Palestine: the Jewish Temple. Choked with debris during the fiery destruction of the city by Roman forces in A.D. 70, this monumental path disappeared from view. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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The Nazi Secret Lurking Inside Some of Tel Aviv’s Most Beautiful Building
Karen Chernick
Times of Israel, Dec. 2, 2019

A single sand-colored tile almost fell on Sharon Golan-Yaron in the lobby of 29 Idelson Street a few years ago, while she and a team were busy converting the modernist Tel Aviv apartment building into a cultural center. “It landed in the palm of my hand,” Golan-Yaron recalls in the book accompanying “Transferumbau: Liebling,” an inaugural exhibition celebrating the Bauhaus building’s recent reopening as the Liebling Haus. “I felt as though it was communicating with me, whispering ‘take me,’ to finally reveal an old, dark secret locked between tile, wall, and builder.”

The terrazzo tile, made in Germany by renowned ceramic manufacturer Villeroy & Boch, had a story to tell and sparked a project uncovering the history of its building and others like it that cropped up in Tel Aviv during the 1930s. What the team of artists who collaborated on Transferumbau ultimately unearthed was an uncomfortable record: during one of its formative decades, Tel Aviv was built upon some considerable Nazi foundations.

The Nazis first began shaping Tel Aviv’s built environment in 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler started his role as chancellor. At the time, they cordoned off the Bauhaus art school in Berlin and gave its administration an ultimatum: it could either change its avant-garde approach, or close. Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, then acting as Bauhaus director, chose the latter. His decision launched the school’s community into a worldwide diaspora, where they spread their alma mater’s love of streamlined minimalism.

Over 20 Bauhaus students emigrated from Germany to British Mandatory Palestine, including four architects: Arieh Sharon, Munio Gitai-Weinraub, Shlomo Bernstein and Shmuel Mestiechkin. These Bauhaus alumni planned only a small number of Tel Aviv buildings, but helped mold the design language of the city, which was then experiencing a population and construction boom. “Modernist architecture became emblematic of a new modern Jewish society, which, uniquely adopted the Bauhaus concept,” notes Claudia Perren, director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, in the Transferumbau book.

Of the roughly 4,000 buildings that have earned Tel Aviv its UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site status for an extraordinarily high concentration of modernist architecture, around a quarter were constructed in the 1930s. Compounding Hitler’s influence on this developing Hebrew city was the fact that – as shown at the Liebling Haus – many of these landmark Bauhaus-inspired buildings were built with supplies manufactured in Nazi Germany. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Buried Treasure
Rokhl Kafrissen
Tablet, Nov. 20, 2019

In his 2012 book Golden Harvest, Polish historian Jan Gross takes as his departure point a curious photograph. A large group of people, men and women, pose in the open air. Many of them have shovels in their hands and what look like human bones are arrayed on the ground in front of them. They are residents of the area around the former Treblinka extermination camp, and the time is soon after the end of the war. Unmarked and unprotected by the government, Treblinka was the site of years of continuous digging and excavation by people like these, in search of treasure. As Gross wrote in Tablet: “Both in Bełżec and in Treblinka it was common practice to take skulls home in order to check them out later, and ‘in peace.’” A gold tooth was the emblematic lucky find.

At the end of the war, before the Soviets arrived, the Germans liquidated Treblinka, destroying the evidence of their crime and plowing the remains into the ground. Writer Rokhl Oyerbakh (1903-1976) surveyed the site of the camp in November 1945. She went as part of a Polish historical commission and produced a book called In the Fields of Treblinka. In the chapter “The Polish Colorado or About the Gold Rush in Treblinka,” Oyerbakh recalls how the Jews deported to Treblinka were encouraged to gather whatever remaining valuables they had to bring with them. We must remember, she wrote, how the murder of the Jews was “first of all, a pillage-murder. The exploitation for gold and valuables.”

The pillage, however, didn’t end with the war. Where there was a corpse still wearing clothes, wrote Oyerbakh, lay the hope of an unsearched pocket. Where there was an unburned Jewish body, there also lay the hope of a mouth from which the German Verterfassung division had not extracted its gold teeth. Oyerbakh called them human jackals and hyenas, those who came to seek oytsres bagrobene (buried treasure) in the fields of Treblinka.

Oyerbakh’s use of “buried treasure” rings with the deepest, bitterest irony. The idea of “buried treasure” remains a powerful one in our culture, though usually in its hopeful, excited register. Buried treasure, however, taps into much more than childish fantasies of pirate booty—or the desperate greed of postwar scavengers.

Archaeologist Cornelius Holtorf argues that part of the modern appeal of archaeology is that it taps into ancient beliefs about what lies “underground” and the means of obtaining it. The perception of hidden depths can make us feel unstable on the surface. Freud analogized psychoanalysis to archaeological excavation of the human soul. Digging into the earth can take us back in time and reveal ancient cities, while excavation can also produce valuable metals and minerals. Underneath is where dead bodies reside and the “underworld” is where dead souls reside. The underneath, of course, is also a source of danger, of things that should be forgotten, or allowed to rest. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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France Reopens Contested Jewish Tomb in East Jerusalem
Ilan Ben Zion
AP, Nov. 8, 2019

French authorities reopened one of Jerusalem’s most magnificent ancient tombs to the public for the first time in over a decade, despite a dispute over access to the archaeological-cum-holy site in the city’s volatile eastern half. After several aborted attempts, the French Consulate General reopened the Tomb of the Kings last month. But tensions between French authorities and Israeli nationalists and ultra-Orthodox Jews who seek open worship at the tomb and challenge France’s ownership continue to make day to day operations problematic at the site.

France, which has managed the property since the late 19th century, closed the site for an extensive $1.1 million restoration in 2009. The French tricolor flutters over the site’s massive black gate marked with the words “Republique Francaise,” which obscures the grand 2,000-year-old mausoleum and Jewish ritual baths from the street.

The Tomb of the Kings is an underground burial complex dating to the first century BC and “definitely one of the most elaborately decorated tombs that we have from the early Roman period in Jerusalem,” said Orit Peleg-Barkat, a Hebrew University archaeologist. Access to the interior burial chambers is prohibited.

Felicien de Saulcy, a Frenchman who excavated the site in 1863 in one of the first modern-era archaeological digs in the Holy Land, mistakenly identified the tomb as belonging to biblical kings. He took two sarcophagi found inside, as well as human remains, back to Paris despite protest by the local Jewish community. They remain in the Louvre’s collection.

In 1878, a French Jewish woman purchased the property through the French consul in Jerusalem, and eight years later one of her heirs donated it to the French government. Today, most archaeologists contend it belonged to Queen Helena, a Mesopotamian monarch who converted to Judaism in the first century BC. Adiabene was an ancient Assyrian kingdom whose rulers converted to Judaism. One of the sarcophagi at the Louvre bears an inscription mentioning a “Queen Saddan,” possibly a relative of the Adiabenian queen. “Altogether, I think there is a scholarly agreement that this tomb should be associated with Helena,” Peleg-Barkat said.

Jews who worship at the tomb believe it is the resting place of several prominent Jewish figures from antiquity, including the revered queen and her relatives, and that praying there will help bring rain and good financial fortune. Ultra-Orthodox Jews have called for the site to open without restrictions for prayer.

The surrounding east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, however, is predominantly Palestinian. In this volatile city, visits by large numbers of religious Jews to a spot in the heart of a Palestinian neighborhood runs the risk of raising tensions or even sparking violence.
Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war and later annexed it, a move unrecognized by most of the international community. Palestinians seek east Jerusalem as the capital of a future state, while Israel considers the entire city its capital. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:

Palestinian Academics Deny Archaeological Evidence of Jews in Israel:  Donna Rachel Edmunds, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 1, 2019 — The Palestinian Authority is continuing with its propaganda mission to deny Jewish links to the land of Israel by placing on television academics who are willing to refute clear archaeological evidence to the contrary.

Teeth Carry Clues to Mysterious Early Human Aurignacians:  Daniel Ben Tal, Israel 21C, Nov. 10, 2019 — Researchers from Tel Aviv University, the Israel Antiquities Authority and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have discovered that the Aurignacians, who lived in the Levant 40,000 years ago, migrated from Europe.

Rare 3rd Century Golan Synagogue Mosaics Show Shift in Jewish Life Post-Temple:  Amanda Borschel-Dan, Times of Israel, Dec. 2, 2019 — Colorful remains of mosaics from a 3rd century synagogue in the ancient town of Majdulia are the earliest evidence of synagogue decoration in the Golan, according to a University of Haifa press release on Monday.

America Has Finally Decided the Bible Is Not Illegal- Opinion:  Mike Evans, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 19, 2019 –Today, the US State Department announced that it will no longer use the term “settlements” to describe Judea and Samaria, a term employed by the UN. In my view, this decision means that the United States has decided that the Bible, in terms of Israel, is not illegal.

Clean and Unclean Foods in Ancient Jerusalem:  Christopher Eames, Watch Jerusalem, Nov. 18, 2019 — When we write about archaeological discoveries, we often describe pottery, inscriptions, tools, jewelry, etc. But alongside all the pottery comes a plethora of animal bones—and these are a vital part of the archaeological (or more properly, archaeozoological) research of a given ancient community, of what they ate.
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This week’s French-language weekly briefing is titled:

Communique: Le Canada trahit ses propres valeurs pour un siège au Conseil de sécurité des Nations-Unies (Dec 6,2019)