Free Republic

A ten-year-old schoolboy accidentally discovered a 100-year-old cross medallion during a school trip to the birthplace of John the Baptist.Nehorai Nir, a student at Jerusalem's Argentina Experimental High School in Kiryat Hoyovel, said that when he was picking edible plants, "I suddenly saw a colourful object shining in the dirt. I pulled it out and was immediately very excited...According to Dr Amrit Re'em, the Jerusalem District Archaeologist of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the cross medallion was made with a micro-mosaic technique."This cross medallion is not considered an antiquity by law as it is 'only' 100-200 years old or so, but...

Jerusalem residents and environmental groups see a threatened ecological "disaster" in the plans for a series of major infrastructure projects to expand roads and build intersections west of the city, being promoted by the Jerusalem Municipality and the Transportation Ministry. The eight proposed projects, mostly for areas just outside the city, involve construction of a large park-and-ride lot with 1,000 spots at Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Karem and highways connecting the suburb of Mevasseret Zion, the Castel National Park area and the outlying neighborhood of Ein Karem. The largest plan, recently presented for members of the public to submit...

A Jerusalem family ripping up its living room floor found a staircase lost for 2,000 years, leading to a large ritual bath carved out of bedrock. It took the family some years to call in the authorities and show them the discovery beneath their house, in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ein Kerem. Throughout the interim, the family blocked off the entrance to the mikveh with wooden doors, and simply continued to live over it. When they did call in the Israel Antiquities Authority, beneath the doors, the archaeologists found the carved stone staircase leaving to a big mikveh, 3.5 meters...