The story you are about to read begins one morning, about a year and a half ago, when Yosef Speizer went out for a morning run in the Tabachnik National Garden on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Speizer, a member of the Jerusalem City Council and a doctoral student in the Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology Department at Bar-Ilan University, has spent two years working on his thesis in the library of the Institute of Archaeology on the campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also located on Mount Scopus. But his morning runs through the park have become a dubious experience.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
That morning, he came across a burial cave – the park is rich in Jewish burial caves that date back to the time of the Second Temple – that bore signs of fresh ash and a recent fire. When he looked inside, Speizer noticed signs that antiquities thieves had been digging there. Nearby, a few human bones were lying exposed, and food and drink wrappers testified to the long hours the unwelcome guests were spending there. A few days later, on another morning run, he found another burial cave in a similar state, and then two more. All around, light fixtures, trash cans, and water faucets had been sabotaged and pulled out of place. And robbers weren't the only ones who wanted to plunder the park – so did drug addicts, alcoholics, and vandals from a nearby Arab village, who made the park a haven after dark.
Ever since then, Speizer has been documenting dozens of similar antiquities sites all over Jerusalem that suffer from neglect, vandalism, and even ethno-religious sabotage – including some important ones. This is how he began his "120" list, which was recently delivered to Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon. Earlier this month, the Jerusalem City Council also discussed it. Leon, unlike his predecessors, takes the matter seriously and intends to handle it.
Iמ many aspects, Speizer's list mirrors the National Heritage Survey prepared by the Shiloh Forum and the Shomrim al Hanetzach heritage preservation NGO about the miserable state of heritage sites in Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley. But his addresses Jerusalem, the country's capital, and some of the sites are in the heart of the city. It's hard to understand how they could have been ignored for so long.
Two weeks ago, Speizer went into the field. The neglect is terrible in almost every part of the city. In Valley of Hinnom, which surrounds Mount Zion and was first mentioned in the Book of Joshua, there are dozens of Jewish burial caves that date back to the Second Temple era. The burial niches in these caves, which face the Second Temple-era wall of Jerusalem recently excavated by Dr. Yehiel Zelinger, were where the elite of the Jewish community, including priests and high priests, were laid to rest starting from the Hasmonean era and through the days of the Second Temple.
The Akeldama and Yochanan caves are two of the burial caves in the valley. In any other city in the world, they would be tourist attractions for Jewish and Christian visitors. In Christian tradition, Akeldama ("Field of Blood" in Hebrew) is where converts were buried, and was supposedly purchased by the priests with money donated by Judas Iscariot. Instead, the place is marred by remnants of campfires, rusty barbed wire, old metal furniture, and bags emptied of their contents by gangs of thieves, who stay here, too, mostly at night.
Worse and even more disgraceful is the situation of the Yochanan cave, where according to Christian tradition the High Priest Yochanan, who held the role in the first century CE, is buried. The cave and the ones next to it were excavated by many researchers, including Robert Macalister (prior to the establishment of the state) and major Israeli researchers such as Professor Amos Kloner and Professors Boaz Zissu, Shimon Gibson, and others. At the end of the 19th century, the cave still held ossuaries containing the bones of the dead. Most of them have been stolen.
A few were researched, and yielded Hebrew names such as Miriam, Esther, and Shimon. Today, a local Arab resident has set up a barred door at the entrance to the Yochanan Cave and turned it into a coop for geese. The area around the cave was illegally fenced, and serves as a grazing area for goats. Not long ago, a camel was also spotted.
Another neglected Jewish burial cave in the area is adorned with a rectangular relief, similar to one believed to have been part of the Temple. Another cave is decorated with a relief depicting a shell. Another cave has lost most of its front to a power shovel, and human bones lie exposed in it. Not far from there, pottery bottles have been found that used to contain oils and perfumes, which were used during burials to stave off bad smells.
The burial method employed in the Valley of Hinnom caves was to lay the remains in burial niches, generally in family caves. Once the places of burial had been closed a year, they would be reopened, and the bones of the person would be collected and stored in an ossuary that remained in the cave. The ossuaries, which were sometimes carved with the names of the deceased, would eventually become targets for antiquities thieves.
Ossuaries are of immense value on the illegal antiquities market, and almost none remain in the caves themselves. Both the Valley of Hinnom and Mount Scopus burial complexes have been consistently robbed over the years, as well as other sites around Jerusalem.
Zissu, from the Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology Department at Bar-Ilan University, who along with the late Kloner wrote the book The Necropolis of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period, tells Israel Hayom that current research is familiar with about 70 Jewish familial burial caves in and around Jerusalem that date from the second century BCE to 70 CE. Most of them, he says, are covered by residential neighborhoods.
"Only a few caves are still accessible to the public, so it's doubly horrifying that most of them are in such pitiful state," Zissu says. "Apart from them being a major national and scientific asset that the government has an obligation to protect for future generations, it's also an asset for research and tourism. Research tries to study the graves to learn about the city, its homes, its decorations, and to learn from the dead about how they lived."
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
Zissu praises the city's care for the Sanhedria Park, and criticizes what is taking place in Hinnom Valley. He says that the excavation and research potential of the burial system there has not been fully realized.
"Even the antiquities robbers know it, and there is a real risk that they will bring an electric shovel to Hinnom Valley and start using it there, like we've already experienced," he says, urging the city to allocate funds to protect and maintain the antiquities sites.
The neglect, the theft, the vandalism, and the ethno-religious attacks do not distinguish between Jewish and Christian sites. The remains of a Byzantine-era monastery from the fifth century CE located on the slopes of Mount Scopus, on the road to Maaleh Adumim, were studied 20 years ago by the Israel Antiquities Authority. The discovery was widely publicized, both in Israel and abroad.
Now place is abandoned. Not much remains of its mosaic floor, and a visit to one of the large water cisterns showed that it was being used largely as a dump. Speizer, who first visited the site of the monastery a few months ago, saw how local residents were using another nearby cistern as a "graveyard" for the corpses of sheep, cats, and dogs.
Many of the sites Speizer mapped have already been reviewed as part of a local planning initiative. Even then, most were in poor shape, but about half of the sites were refurbished in the early 2000s. Since then, time has passed and things have gotten worse. Speizer defines these sites as "an educational resources and physical background to understand history. A way of anchoring our roots here. Preservation will allow continued research into the past and will also hand the discoveries over to the generations to come, in acknowledgement of all the generations' shared ownership of the assets of the past."
The first stage of his proposal calls for the city of Jerusalem, in conjunction with the IAA, to put up signage to make city residents aware of the value of these sites, some of which lie next to or within residential neighborhoods. The second stage calls for personnel to be assigned to oversee the sites and keep them clean. Speizer mentions that in 2010, the city employed a team of preservation and maintenance workers, and thinks it should be reformed.
He does cite a few bright points: a section of an aqueduct that carried water to Jerusalem in the time of the Second Temple that was discovered on the grounds of a nursery school in the Tsur Baher neighborhood and preserved; a Temple-era mikveh that was recently excavated in the Kidron ravine near a church in Gethsemane, which is under careful supervision; a grave complex dating to the First Temple Era near the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, which is well-maintained; or Hirbt Tel-Arza below Gilo, where the IAA initiated an excavation together with community authorities that revealed a wine press, agricultural facilities, and a mikveh, all from the Second Temple period.
Some of the sites on Speizer's list are located on the grounds of the national park that surrounds Jerusalem, which is run by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, but most of them are within the Jerusalem municipal boundaries and are the city's responsibility. But the city has lifted a finger for decades. The IAA excavates and studies sites, and decides whether to recover them or leave them exposed, but for the most part does not maintain archaeological sites on its own.
Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon tells Israel Hayom that the neglect of heritage sites is something that has been ignored for decades, but he intends to meet with head of the IAA Eli Escosido, who reached out to him on the matter, suggesting that they work together to address the issues at the sites Speizer mapped.
However, Leon says, the city obviously doesn't have the funds to maintain all the antiquities sites within its borders. "But if, for example, we're talking about reforming the preservation team run jointly by the city and the IAA, at reasonable costs that will allow these important antiquities sites to be addressed, I believe we'll manage to come up with a budget, municipal or from the national government, to fund this national mission.
"A people that does not honor its past – as my predecessors have said – has a drab present and future. This is an issued that united coalition and opposition in Jerusalem, and I intend to take care of it," Leon says.
