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Ancient Synagogue at Sussiya

The ancient Jewish city of Sussiya in southern Judea was a large and developed Jewish settlement in the time of the writing of the Talmud. Because no new settlement was built on the ruins of the old one, the site was well preserved through the centuries. Most impressive to see are the remains of the written and pictorial mosaics in the ancient synagogue.

The Sussiya Education Center, at the new Jewish settlement built near the site of original Sussiya, offers guided tours of the ancient city and hostel accommodations. To arrange a tour, call: 02-9963424; 02-9963012 or fax: 02-9961511.

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JEWISH ROOTS IN SOUTHERN JUDEA

After Israeli forces liberated the remainder of Judea in the miraculous Six-Day War, Yochanan Ben Yaakov was part of a group of Jews who explored the south Hebron hills in southern Judea to search for traces of their Jewish past. They found Jewish synagogues in Eshtemoa, Yatta, and Carmel. Indeed, in Yatta, one of the two major Arab clans described their own Jewish roots. In winter they would buy candles from the Jews in Hebron and light them for eight days. They refused to eat camel, a common (non-kosher) delicacy, and would not intermarry with the other clan in the village.

At the edge of the Judean desert the exploring group found a ruined city known locally as Susiya, which, unlike other sites, had never been resettled. At the highest point on the hill were the vague outlines of a large rectangular stone building. Returning again and again to the site, they dug out the earth that had filled in the structure until, at a depth of two meters, they found the original mosaic floor of an ancient Jewish synagogue.

Yochanan brought his six-year-old daughter to see the site and she was able to read the 1,300-year-old Hebrew inscriptions laid into the mosaic floor. There is nowhere else in the world, not even in China, where today's children can so easily read such messages from the distant past.

The efforts of Yochanan and his group led to a revision of our knowledge of Jewish history in southern Judea. After the Bar Kochba rebellion was crushed by the Romans in the 2nd century and Jews were banned from Jerusalem, it had been thought that most of the remnant who remained in Eretz Israel made their way northward to the Galilee. Yet the new explorations revealed that some 40 new Jewish villages had been established in the south Hebron hills after the time of Bar Kochba, which flourished for 500 years until the Muslim conquest in the 7th century. Yochanan told us these stories as our guide on a Friday morning tour of the area sponsored by the Etzion Bloc Field School. He noted how, because of the lack of water in the area south of Hebron, Arab settlement was concentrated in four large towns, leaving huge empty spaces. He also pointed out the tracts of new young olive trees, the results of a massive organized PLO campaign begun after the Camp David accord in 1977 to claim new land for the Arabs and to block its resettlement by Jews.

The Arabs know that the Jews have returned to reclaim their birthright and their inheritance. They know that Judea is Jewish land, the heart of the Land of Israel.