The pool consists of an underground chamber entered by way of steps. The mikveh received the rainwater from three collecting basins (otzar) that were hewn on the roof of the bath, and the pure water was conveyed onside the chamber through channels. The pool, located in a picturesque valley with ancient agriculture, was uncovered a short distance from houses in the neighbourhood. It conforms to all the Jewish laws and the walls were treated with a special kind of plaster, Storchan stated.

The ritual baths usually consist of a closed cavity that was supplied with rainwater conveyed from a small rock-cut pool located nearby. The complex that was exposed at this site is a more sophisticated and intricate system, apparently associated with a settlement that was situated there in the Second Temple period. Due to the rainfall regime and arid conditions of the region, the inhabitants sought special techniques that would make it possible to store every drop of water. The Israel Antiquities Authority and the Moriah Company involved in the area’s development are “working to make this ancient treasure a site for the benefit of the residents and visitors,” according to the IAA.

Researcher Yitzhak Paz, of the Israel Antiquities Authority and Ben-Gurion University, informed LiveScience.com the structure could date back more than 4,000 years. The “effort invested in such an enterprise is indicative of a complex, well-organized society, with planning skills and economic ability,” the researchers wrote in their journal paper.

Close inspection by scuba diving revealed that the structure is made of basalt boulders up to 1 meter long with no apparent construction pattern and no signs of cutting or chiseling. A possible interpretation for the structure is related to the fact that it attracts fish and thus may be interpreted as a part of a marine-based economy. If this is the case, the structure must have been built as an underwater structure, the archaeologists wrote. Such structures built of stone are thought to be ancient fish nurseries that are well known in the Sea of Galilee and are found near the shores at regular intervals. However, they are significantly smaller than the structure revealed recently, with diameters of up to 4 meters.

An alternative scenario is that the structure was built onshore, when the water level was lower than today. A report on LiveScience.com stated the structure appears to be a giant cairn, with rocks piled on top of each other. Structures like this are known from elsewhere in the world and are sometimes used to mark burials, according to the report. Researchers do not know if the newly discovered structure was used for this purpose.

Some chose the latter, but others, for their own reasons, chose the former and remained in Poland, living as Polish gentiles. Many married and had children, and often, even when marrying a fellow Jewish survivor, they did not tell their children who they really were.

By doing so, many were repeating a pattern that had been established in previous generations. After particularly severe pogroms, some Jews would just “opt out,” escaping their village to live in a big city like Warsaw, where they could attempt to assimilate. They, too, never told their children the truth about their backgrounds, and in some cases, they themselves had children and even grandchildren who had hidden Jewish roots. But the indomitable Jewish spirit is difficult to stamp out, even generations later.

On Holocaust Memorial Day eve, dozens of the “hidden Jews” of Poland gathered in Oswiecem, better known as Auschwitz, the town adjacent to the most notorious of Poland’s concentration camps. The gathering, a Shabbat celebration, was organized by the Shavei Israel organization, which has helped people young and old around the world get back in touch with their Jewish identities.

Jews first settled in Oswiecem in the 1500s (the village was known to Jews as Oshpitzin), and contained dozens of synagogues until the very eve of the Holocaust. In 1939, 14,000 people lived in the town, 8,200 of them Jews. Nearly all were murdered by the Nazis. By September 1945, only 186 Jews were left in the town and by November 1946 there were just 40, most of whom had left for Israel or the U.S. by the mid-1950s.

In recent years, a growing number of young Poles have begun researching their Jewish roots, those roots that Hitler and his Nazi regime sought to stamp out. Shavei Yisrael CEO Michael Freund stated, “I cannot think of a better way to express the victory of the Jewish people than to celebrate Shabbat with young Poles who wish to learn about their Jewish roots at the edge of the valley of death in Auschwitz.” The seminar, held over Shabbat, featured traditional Shabbat meals, discussions and symposia on Judaism and Jewish history, and events to encourage the youths to reach out to others with the same concerns and desires as their own. The event was held in the Lomdei Mishnayot Synagogue, the only active synagogue in the area.

According to the Christian belief, Herod slaughtered infants in Bethlehem on hearing of the birth of Jesus. He was also believed to have killed three of his own sons and one of his wives, as well as many political foes. He was, in the words of first century historian Flavius Josephus, “equally cruel to everyone, a slave to his temper who distorted justice.” This ego, however, combined with rare organizational and political talents, was what pushed him to demonstrate his grandeur to both his Jewish subjects in Jerusalem and fellow rulers across the Roman empire, by building monumental palaces and renovating the Jewish Second Temple.

An new exhibition at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum sheds new light on the life and death of “Herod the Great”, the ancient king by focusing on his stunning archaeological legacy and whose empire sought to straddle imperial Rome and a flourishing Jewish culture. The exhibition is described by Israel Museum’s director James Snyder as the museum’s “most ambitious” archaeological undertaking and the first ever to focus on Herod.

It takes visitors on a journey that starts at the winter palace in Jericho and ends at Herodium, a hollowed-out hill near Bethlehem where he built a palace and fortress. The meticulous reconstruction showcases the height of Roman fashion and craft work from a stone bath and patterned floors to a set of jugs for holding the finest delicacies imported from Europe.

Among the 250 artifacts on display is a decorated cornice from Herod’s most grandiose undertaking: the expansion of the Second Temple. Three-dimensional video exhibits use aerial photography to show how Herod’s massive structures would have appeared today. In the Herodium, away from the religious centre of Jerusalem, one could feel free to enjoy exquisite wall paintings and frescos at his palace. These were replete with images of animals and people, which Judaism views as idolatrous. Behind a row of giant columns stands the centerpiece of the exhibition: a reconstruction of the king’s burial chamber at Herodium.

Herod’s greatness came from him retaining the delicate balance between the western and eastern cultures he represented, Snyder stated. “At the same time that Herod managed to have strong diplomatic ties to the home base (Rome), he enabled the flourishing here of a local culture which was Second Temple period Judaism.” “That delicate balance is really a remarkable thing to see in history, and Herod accomplished that.”

Roi Porat, a Hebrew University archaeologist who worked on the excavation of Herodium, stated Herod had tried to resolve the internal conflict of belonging to two opposing camps. “On the one hand, he wanted to be a Jewish king, and on the other, he wanted to be the King of Judaea for the Romans.” “He tried to win the sympathy of both sides by building a holy site of worship for the Jews and by building the largest temple for the Romans.” Everything about Herod was extreme, he stated: his diplomatic skills, his financial abilities and his ambitious construction projects, which included six desert palaces, the Temple and the port of Caesarea.

Hebrew University archaeologist Ehud Netzer spent four decades searching for Herod’s burial site on the mount, announcing he found the first evidence of its location in 2007. However, three years later, he fell to his death during an initial tour of the site. The museum has dedicated the exhibition entitled “Herod the Great – The King’s Final Journey” to Netzer’s memory.

The ghetto initially held some 380,000 Jews who were cramped into tight living spaces. At its peak, the ghetto housed about a half a million Jews, stated Havi Dreifuss, a researcher at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial who has studied the ghetto. Life in the ghetto included random raids, confiscations and abductions by Nazi soldiers. Disease and starvation were rampant, and bodies often appeared on the streets.

The 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising was the first large-scale rebellion against the Nazis in Europe and the single greatest act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Though guaranteed to fail, it became a symbol of struggle against impossible conditions, illustrated a refusal to succumb to Nazi atrocities and inspired other acts of uprising and underground resistance by Jews and non-Jews alike.

The resistance movement began to grow after the deportation of July 22, 1942, when 265,000 men, women and children were rounded up and later killed at the Treblinka death camp. As word of the Nazi genocide spread, those who remained behind no longer believed German promises that they would be sent to forced labour camps. A small group of rebels began to spread calls for resistance, carrying out isolated acts of sabotage and attacks. Some Jews began defying German orders to report for deportation.

The Nazis entered the ghetto on April 19, 1943, the eve of the Passover holiday. Three days later, the Nazis set the ghetto ablaze, turning it into a fiery death trap, but the Jewish fighters kept up their struggle for nearly a month. The Jewish fighters who had fortified themselves in bunkers and hiding places managed to kill 16 Nazis and wound almost 100, states Dreifuss. They were ultimately brutally vanquished.

Mordechai Anielewicz, the resistance leader and others died inside the bunker on 18 Mila Street, which later became the title of a famous novel by Leon Uris that fictionalized the events. “It was a moral victory. No one believed the Jews would fight back,” stated Dreifuss. “It’s amazing that after three years of Nazi occupation, starvation and illness, these people found the strength to disobey the Nazi orders, stand up and fight back.” Anielewicz, who was in his early 20s, became a heroic figure in Israel, with a village and streets across the nation named in his honour.

Two days before her comrades embarked on an uprising that came to symbolize Jewish resistance against the Nazis in World War II, 14-year-old Aliza Mendel got her orders: Escape from the Warsaw Ghetto. The end was near. Nazi troops had encircled the ghetto, and the remaining Jewish rebels inside were prepared to die fighting. They had few weapons, and they felt there was no point in giving one of them to a teenage girl whose main task to that point had been distributing leaflets.

“They told me I was too young to fight,” states the survivor, now 84, who uses her married name, Aliza Vitis-Shomron. “They said, ‘You have to leave and tell the world how we died fighting the Nazis. That is your job now.’” Vitis-Shomron remembers Anielewicz well. She states he was a tall, charismatic leader of a younger generation who refused to submit quietly to the Nazis as their parents did.”His theory was, ‘don’t get used to what is happening. Don’t accept it.’” “The Nazis wanted to turn us into slaves, and he said that only free people could resist.” She’s been doing that ever since, publishing a memoir about life in the ghetto and lecturing about the revolt and its legendary leader, Mordechai Anielewicz.

The approach put Vitis-Shomron at odds with her parents, who objected to her activity in the youth movement. Often she would defy the Nazi curfew and only return home in the morning. She narrowly escaped S.S. officers in the streets as she posted underground leaflets calling on Jews to resist or escape.

She stated the hardest part for her was escaping before the uprising began, joining her mother and younger sister in their hideout on the Polish side of town outside the ghetto. She remembers watching the red skies above the burning ghetto, where her friends were waging war. “If it was up to me, I would have stayed behind and fought to the death with them. I had no fear,” she stated. “The uprising represented Jewish pride. It was us saying, ‘we will not die the way you want us to. We will die the way we want to, as free people.’”

Vitis-Shomron was later captured and sent the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with her mother and sister. They all survived and eventually made it to Israel. Her father was deported from the ghetto and killed in a Nazi death camp. While nearly all her friends perished, she survived the ghetto and the later period in the Nazi concentration camp. She made it to Israel, married and has three children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

On April 7,2013, 70 years after the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Vitis-Shomron is set to speak on behalf of Holocaust survivors at the official ceremony marking Israel’s annual Holocaust memorial day. “It’s a day of deep sorrow for me, because I remember all my friends in the (resistance) movement who gave their lives,” states Vitis-Shomron. “But it was also a wonderful act of sacrifice by those who gave up their lives without even trying to save themselves. The goal was to show that we would not go down without a response.”

Today, Vitis-Shomron volunteers for Yad Vashem, collecting pages of testimony from fellow survivors that help build the museum’s depository of names of the victims. Despite her own past, she claims not to have experienced the psychological damage that plague other survivors. “I never saw myself as a victim. I was on the active side, the resisting side,” she stated. “It helped me cope.”

While the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. Israel’s annual Holocaust memorial day coincides with the Hebrew date of the Warsaw ghetto uprising highlighting the role it plays in the country’s psyche. Even the day’s official name, “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day” alludes to the image of the Jewish warrior upon which the state was re-established.

The Warsaw ghetto battle contrasts with the image of Jews meekly marching to their deaths. Israel has wrestled with the competing images for decades. After re-establishing their state in 1948, three years after the end of the war, Israelis preferred to emphasize the heroic resistance fighters, though their numbers were relatively small. In recent years they have come around to recognizing the overwhelming tragedy of the murder of millions of Jews and the traumas of the survivors who still live along them.

Online: http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/warsaw_ghetto_testimonies/index.asp

The 2,000-year-old house of worship was perched upon the cave according to ancient tradition that was used by the Biblical prophet Elijah to conceal himself from those who would arrest and prosecute him. The synagogue, allegedly built by the Biblical prophet Elisha, and subsequently repaired during the first century CE by the Torah sage, Rabbi Elazar ben Arach, is one of Syria’s oldest. It stands at the site where Elijah anointed Elisha as a prophet, to follow him.

There had been almost no structural changes whatsoever to the synagogue since it was built, making it especially unique architecturally as well as historically. That is until the savage civil wars prompted by the region wide “Arab Spring’ launched in March 2011 arrived in Syria. It is clear nevertheless that the preservation of the holy site has been a rare miracle at best.

A video posted online by the Syrian opposition showed the same synagogue,  one of Judaism’s holiest sites severely damaged in shelling by Syrian government forces in the Damascus district of Jobar earlier this month. The video, which appeared on the pan-Arabic Al Arabiya news website, showed a clear photo of the marble plaque indicating the “Shrine and Synagogue of Prophet Eliahou Hanabi since 720 B.C.

Writer Jack Koury added a “Note” to his March 2 post about the incident on the “War in Iraq” blog, showing that the synagogue’s destruction and related attacks on Jews are being encouraged by outside forces as well as those within Syria. “Dear Al-Assad, please destroy any sign of Jewish existence in your country, this maybe the only chance you have right now. After rebellion is dead you will not able to do that. Do not waste the crisis “as jews say” And Rebels are only tools in Jewish hands! May God Bless you”

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and opposition forces are each blaming the other over the destruction, according to a report in a Hebrew-language daily newspaper.

The Inquisition was active in the area for centuries in which Marranos and conversos were tortured until 1700 and possibly later. But the Bnei Anousim of the area clung to their Jewish identity handing it down from one generation to the next. It is their descendants who are beginning to return to their roots of their Jewish past. In southern Italy, much like Spain and South America, descendants search for their Jewish ancestral history.

The Jewish presence in Sicily dates back some two thousand years. Some historians state the first Jews in Sicily were brought there as slaves by the victorious Roman legions during the Second Temple period. The community steadily grew in the ensuing centuries despite various periods of persecution, and produced an array of great scholars and rabbis. There were 52 Jewish communities spread out across Sicily, numbering at least 37,000 people.

Many left by December 31, 1492, but large numbers of forcibly-converted Jews were compelled to remain behind, where they suffered under the heavy hand of the Inquisition. The first auto-da-fe in Sicily took place in Palermo in June 1511, when the Inquisitors executed nine Sicilian Bnei Anousim for secretly practicing Judaism. Towards the end of the 14th century, Sicily’s Jews were confined to ghettos and faced increasingly harsh decrees as well as massacres and forced conversions to Catholicism. At the time, Sicily was under the control of the Spanish crown and in 1492, the anti-Semitic measures reached their peak with the Edict of Expulsion, which ordered the remaining Jews to leave.

Rabbi Pinchas Punturello, has been appointed to serve as the new emissary for the Shavei Israel organization in southern Italy and Sicily. In his new position, Rabbi Punturello will serve as the area’s chief rabbi, and will work to strengthen the local Jewish community in regions such as Puglia, Campania, Sicily, and Calabria, while also reaching out to the Bnei Anousim (whom historians refer to by the derogatory term Marranos) throughout the area, many of whom are looking to reconnect with the Jewish people.

Rabbi Punterello will work to expand Shavei Israel’s activities throughout Italy, which will include: convening seminars and symposiums for the Bnei Anousim, organizing prayer services and regular classes on Jewish subjects, publishing newsletters and other Italian-language material on Jewish topics and distributing them among various communities in southern Italy; as well as providing assistance with the aliyah, conversion and absorption processes for those members of the community who choose to immigrate to Israel. He will also head the “Sud Italia” project organized by Shavei Israel and UCEI, Union of Italian Jewish Communities, aims to recover traditional, spiritual and religious rights of all groups, families and individuals, in Puglia, Sicily, Calabria and Campania who are rediscovering their origins and need help.

Shavei Israel, which reaches out to communities of “hidden Jews” and helps them to reconnect with the Jewish People and State of Israel, is undertaking this project in conjunction with the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, the official umbrella organization of Italian Jewry. It marks the first time that a rabbi has been appointed to work specifically with the Bnei Anousim of southern Italy and Sicily. In recent years, a growing number of Bnei Anousim in southern Italy have begun rediscovering their Jewish roots and expressing a desire to draw closer to Israel and the Jewish people. It is incumbent upon us to reach out to them and help them to do so.

O’Brien gave no clue as to what exactly his sexual misbehaviour consisted of but O’Brien’s time as cardinal ended as it began in controversy. In 2003, as a condition of being made a cardinal, he was forced to issue a public pledge to defend church teaching on homosexuality, celibacy and contraception. He was pressured to make the pledge after he had called for a “full and open discussion” on such matters. At the time, O’Brien stated he had been misunderstood and wanted to clarify his position. However previous statements made before the scandal over his behaviour broke, O’Brien stated celibacy should be reconsidered because it’s not based on doctrine but rather church tradition and “is not of divine origin.

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor stated, “Varian Fry stood up to say ‘no’. Others did too, but too few.” “And we know that whenever and wherever good people stood up to say ‘no,’ Jews lived, Catholics lived, and others lived. Imagine what would have happened if there were more people like Varian Fry.” The ADL ‘Courage to Care’ Award is named in honor of one of its first recipients, Jan Karski, a Polish diplomat and righteous Gentile who provided the West with one of the first eyewitness accounts of Hitler’s Final Solution. It is made possible through a generous grant from Eileen Ludwig-Greenland. The award was presented in the form of a plaque with bas-reliefs that was designed by noted sculptor Arbit Blatas and depicts the horrifying context, the Nazis’ persecution, deportation and murder of millions of Jews that served as a backdrop for the rescuers’ exceptional deeds.

By Evelyn Gordon
JINSA Fellow

January 24, 2013: When the Palestinian Authority (PA) obtained UN recognition as a nonmember observer state in November, many Israelis feared the consequences for Israel: After all, PA President Mahmoud Abbas stated openly that he sought recognition primarily “to pursue claims against Israel” in international forums. Those fears may yet prove justified. But so far, the biggest victim of Abbas’s UN bid has been the PA itself.

The PA currently faces the worst financial crisis of its crisis-filled history. According to PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, it’s in “extreme jeopardy,” and on the “verge of being completely incapacitated.” Its 150,000 employees have received only half their November salaries and nothing for December. It “owes local banks more than $1.3 billion and can’t get more loans,” the Associated Press reported. It “also owes hundreds of millions of dollars to private businesses, including suppliers to hospitals, some of whom have stopped doing business with the government.” And it expects the poverty rate to double, to a whopping 50 percent of the total Palestinian population in the territories, if the crisis isn’t resolved soon.

So dire is the situation that a mere month after the vote, Abbas was already threatening to dissolve the PA and return full control of the territory to Israel if things didn’t improve quickly. If the PA can’t even pay salaries, he said, “What’s left for us to do?”

In short, far from augmenting Palestinians’ independence, the UN vote has endangered even the limited autonomy they currently have. For the financial crisis is a direct consequence of that vote – and, even worse, a totally predictable one.

The first source of the crisis is that Israel stopped transferring roughly $100 million a month in taxes it collects on the PA’s behalf. Contrary to Fayyad’s disingenuous charge of Israeli “piracy,” this merely ended an ongoing Palestinian piracy: For years, the PA hadn’t paid its bills to the Israel Electric Corporation, but Israel swallowed the loss, at considerable sacrifice: The IEC’s finances are so precarious that it can’t raise money without government guarantees. Last year, it sought a 30% rate hike from Israeli consumers to stabilize them. Yet Israel’s agreements with the Palestinians entitle the state to cover such debts by withholding money from the monthly transfers. The Israeli government repeatedly warned both the PA and UN member states that if the UN bid went forward, in violation of all Israeli-Palestinian agreements, it would withhold the full NIS 800 million (about $214 million) it was owed to it.

Second, Congress has been withholding some $450 million in U.S. aid – and though the Obama administration wants this money released, Congress hasn’t yet agreed. This, too, was known in advance: Washington repeatedly warned that the UN bid “would have significant negative consequences” for America’s “ability to maintain our significant financial support for the Palestinian Authority.”

Third, though Arab states promised to cover the shortfall emergency donation (which hasn’t yet arrived), but no money is even in the pipeline for the following months. And despite Fayyad’s professed bewilderment at this lapse (“I have no explanation,” he said), it was completely predictable: Arab states have serially defaulted on previous pledges to the PA, so why would they behave differently this time?

Finally, there’s the PA’s own fiscal mismanagement – from the billions of dollars it pours into Hamas-run Gaza, including paying 60,000 former PA employees full-time salaries to sit at home and do nothing, to such grandiose money-wasters as allocating more than $1 million to commemorate the 48th anniversary of Fatah’s first terrorist attack on Israel (even as its own employees go unpaid) or booking first-class tickets and five-star hotels for 22 Arab foreign ministers to attend its UN triumph (though most never showed). This, too, was well-known.

Nevertheless, the PA opted to proceed with the UN bid. In short, it walked into a full-blown fiscal crisis with eyes wide open. And only nine countries opposed this decision.

Or, to put it another way, the PA deliberately chose to subject its own people to severe financial hardship – tens of thousands of breadwinners with unpaid salaries, a skyrocketing poverty rate – for the sake of scoring points against Israel in the international arena. And virtually the entire world knowingly abetted this choice rather than insisting that the PA put its people’s welfare first.

The sorriest part of this story, however, is that it isn’t unusual. The PA has consistently put harming Israel ahead of helping its own people – most notably, as I explained in a previous JINSA column, by refusing repeated Israeli offers of statehood, thereby leaving millions of Palestinian refugees vulnerable to repression and expulsion from other Mideast countries. And Western countries have consistently supported this self-destructive behavior, out of a misguided notion that by supporting the PA’s positions, they “bolster” the PA and thereby help the Palestinian people.

The UN bid was a prime example: Several European countries said they voted yes or abstained because Hamas’s popularity was boosted by its conflict with Israel in November, so they needed to bolster Abbas by giving him a “victory” too – even if, as some European ambassadors admitted, this “victory” might actually “lead to further hardening of positions instead of improving chances of a two-state solution.”

Similarly, the European Union repeatedly and explicitly backs PA demands on final-status issues like borders and Jerusalem while not explicitly demanding any Palestinian concessions. Yet this effort to bolster the PA’s negotiating position merely reinforces the Palestinian delusion that no reciprocal concessions are required, even on obvious deal-breakers like the “right of return.” President Obama sought to bolster the PA by backing its demand for an Israeli settlement freeze, only to have Palestinians dismiss the “unprecedented” freeze he secured as “worse than useless” and refuse even to begin negotiations.

Indeed, after 20 years of Western efforts to “bolster” the PA, not only is there still no Palestinian state, but the PA itself is on the brink of financial collapse. So instead of clinging to the same failed tactics, perhaps Western governments should try something different.

Rather than “bolstering” the PA by acceding to its every whim, however self-destructive, while constantly seeking more Israeli concessions, they should try pressing Palestinians to finally make the concessions needed to seal a deal. It couldn’t possibly fail more miserably. And it just might work better.

Evelyn Gordon, JINSA Fellow, is a journalist and commentator writing in The Jerusalem Post and Commentary.