Israeli Archaeologists Return an Elaborate Mosaic to Its Home

In 1996, a routine excavation in the city of Lod uncovered a portion of an elaborate mosaic from the 3rd or 4th century CE. Archaeologists came across other sections in the ensuing years and, after extensive restoration efforts, have recently returned it to its original location, where a special museum has been built to house it. Amanda Borschel-Dan, who calls it “one of the most beautiful treasures of Roman-era Holy Land,” writes:

Made up of several panels, the Lod mosaic is some seventeen meters long and nine meters wide—approximately 180 square meters in area (some 1,940 square feet). Among the colorful illustrations found on the mosaic are boats with oars, and animals including elephants, lions, birds, fish, and crustaceans. There are also plant life and flowers, vases, and geometric patterns.

The combination of mosaics, artifacts, and architectural evidence such as frescos from the late-3rd and early 4th-century Roman period uncovered in the excavations provides evidence of Mediterranean luxury that characterized the Roman empire, said the Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Amir Gorzalczany, who directed one of the excavations following the discovery of a new section.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Ancient Israel, Ancient Rome, Archaeology, Mosaics

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society