Israel Should Fund the Temple Mount Sifting Project

In 1999, the Islamic Waqf—the Jordanian-controlled organization that administers the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem—together with the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement—the Israeli chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood—decided to build a new, subterranean mosque underneath al-Aqsa. To do so, they destroyed the structure known as Solomon’s Stables, built by King Herod around the beginning of the Common Era. Israeli archaeologists have since then been trying to rescue artifacts that were displaced in the process, but their funding has recently run dry. David M. Weinberg writes:

Without any scientific supervision whatsoever, [the Waqf] bulldozed 9,000 tons of the most sensitive and valuable earth on the globe and unceremoniously dumped close to 400 truckloads of it as “garbage” in the Kidron Valley [which runs between the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives]. I have no doubt the Islamists were seeking not only to expand their prayer space but deliberately to destroy any traces of Jewish history on and under the Temple Mount.

In a bold move, the archaeologists Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Dvira of Bar-Ilan University waded into the dump, and in 2004 they started sifting it. Their initiative became the Temple Mount Sifting Project, the goal of which is to rescue ancient artifacts and to research the archaeology and history of the Temple Mount.

Over the past twelve years, it has grown into a project of international significance. With the help of nearly 200,000 volunteers, half a million valuable finds have been discovered from the First and Second Temple periods, the late-Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, and Islamic periods, and the Middle Ages. . . .

These constitute the first-ever archaeological data from below the Temple Mount. Though the artifacts have been wrenched from their archaeological context (again, nefariously), the project has used innovative methodology and survey techniques . . . to analyze the finds. . . . All of this has transformed our understanding of the history of the Temple Mount. . . .

The project needs 8 million shekels ($2.2 million) over the next four years to resume sifting of the remaining 30 percent [of the material], and to continue scientific research and publication efforts. Until now, for twelve long years, private donations and the Ir David Foundation have funded the project. Now it is time for the government to back the project generously.

Read more at Israel Hayom

More about: Archaeology, Islamic Movement, Islamism, Israel & Zionism, Temple Mount

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