1.

"Come speak with Darya's class," Hadas, the teacher, told me. "Share some life advice as they finish elementary school." The "Bereshit" school in Rehovot insists on calling itself an "educational home." And what a year they've had; such young students whose learning and play were interspersed with existential issues.

This week, Darya told me her generation has experienced more pandemics, wars, and alarms in their young lives than other generations. She stated it as fact, not complaint. In our conversations, I've noticed a historical awareness growing within her ("In thirty years, I'll tell my children that fields once stood where we walked"). I looked at her, wondering how to respond to a child with adult insights. You know, I said, it's precisely this thought that encourages me and assures me your generation will be better than ours – more resilient, unique, and profound. You will build the next floor of our lives here in the treasured land of our forefathers.

2.

I entered the classroom. The boys arrived breathless from their games while the girls sat with inner calm. I asked them to try to retain some of my words for the coming years. Words are seeds that need time to blossom and bear fruit. Perhaps you'll remember me decades from now, just as I recall something from finishing elementary school, right before leaving my childhood neighborhood, which until then seemed a distant star, to study at the Junior High Kiryat Ya'akov Herzog, an institution I can only liken to Harry Potter's Hogwarts...

You stand before the great sea of your lives, I told the children. It will not part on its own; it awaits your entry. The sea is deep, its depths filled with treasures, challenges, and dreams. Dangers also lurk there. We adults stand on the opposite shore, seeking to guide and warn you from our experience. You will face obstacles and difficulties. You may resent and rage against your fate. But you can view hardships as challenges meant to improve and build you. The difficulty will be the same, but your interpretation will determine how you overcome it and grow from it.

I still remember a classmate who played marbles and cards with me. I was privileged to soar while he remained on life's margins. One day I heard an explosive was planted on his scooter and he was killed. Gang warfare. The news shook me. I thought of our innocent starting line and the deceptive blink of an eye in which our fates could have been reversed under different circumstances. Not everything depends on adults or society, dear children; an important part of your destiny depends on you.

3.

It's vital to stay in constant motion, not rest on your laurels but to walk, not be lazy, to gather knowledge, ideas, friends, experiences, taking something from each station for the journey ahead. This is the first commandment given to Abraham, our forefather: "Go forth..." If we keep going, we ultimately reach the good land. The second commandment is Abrahamic: "Do not make for yourself an idol..." – don't turn yourself into a statue, don't become enamored with yourself, and think you know everything with nothing to learn from others. Remember Narcissus? Yes, some answered (Darya is now also discovering Greek mythology). He fell in love with himself when he saw his reflection in the river, closing himself off and missing out on life. So be sure to stay in motion and look around you. Be curious.

An important condition for success in life is the desire for knowledge. In physics, there is a law of conservation of energy. In education, there is a law of conservation of knowledge. No information you've learned will fail to serve you someday. You sit in a classroom, so even if you're bored, make an effort and listen, use the time to add more knowledge to your repository. Read books; it's the best gift you can give yourself. Whoever turns off the phone on Shabbat will be forced to read, even if they don't want to, like in the old days. Study the weekly Torah portion on Shabbat; this way the Bible will be part of who you are.

I told them the Quran calls us "Ahl al-Kitab," People of the Book, because of the Bible. But we are the People of the Books. We received the Torah, then came the Prophets and Writings, and in the second century, Rabbi Judah the Prince wrote the Mishnah. In subsequent centuries the Talmuds were written in Israel and Babylon, then Biblical commentaries in the Middle Ages, the Zohar, legal rulings, philosophy, and countless other books, until we erected a colossal skyscraper unmatched by any other nation for its descendants. Each generation added its own floor to the multidimensional edifice, and you, dear children, have the right to visit any floor you wish. Don't miss the opportunity; after all, you already speak the language.

4.

Study history. This way you will remember throughout your long journey where we came from and where we wish to go. I told them when we adopted the word in Hebrew, some spelled it "historyah," meaning God (Yah) concealing (Hester) himself behind national and global events and directing them. Soon we will reach the 9th of Av and commemorate the first destruction (586 BCE) and the second (70 CE). The Jews in the first exile despaired; they thought it was the end of Israel and there would be no continuity in the next generation. "Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, we are cut off." But the prophet Ezekiel insists "our hope is not yet lost." He tells them of a tremendous historical vision God showed him: A valley full of dry bones turning into a multitude representing our people. And he promises that God will open our graves and return us home to the Land of Israel.

In the 1880s, a Hebrew poet in Romania wrote to his generation that as long as a Jewish soul stirs in our hearts, and as long as our eyes gaze eastward toward Zion, our hope to return to our ancestral homeland is not lost. I don't remember if they knew the poet's name, so I repeated it: Naftali Herz Imber. You understand, I told them, our national anthem corresponds with Ezekiel's prophecy. Indeed, our hope was not lost, and at the end of a long, painful process we came home to Zion. And from national history, we learn for our private lives: Even if you find yourselves in difficult situations later on, do not lose hope. Your redemption awaits just around the corner.

5.

"Dad," Darya whispered to me afterward, "two kids told me you could have spoken faster, and you repeated things." Honest children. "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast Thou founded strength, because of Thine adversaries; that Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger (Pslams 8:3)" You're right, my daughter, because I understand the gravity of the task assigned to me and the importance of this conversation. I acted according to the eternal command "teach them to your children" (Deuteronomy 11:19 ) –  sons and daughters – hoping something of my words will be seared into the memory of one child, provisions for the road ahead, just as I remember to this day the kind eyes of my parents and teachers accompanying me, just before we entered the great sea of our lives.

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The story you are about to read begins one morning, about a year and a half ago, when Yosef Speizer went out for a morning run in the Tabachnik National Garden on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. Speizer, a member of the Jerusalem City Council and a doctoral student in the Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology Department at Bar-Ilan University, has spent two years working on his thesis in the library of the Institute of Archaeology on the campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also located on Mount Scopus. But his morning runs through the park have become a dubious experience. 

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That morning, he came across a burial cave – the park is rich in Jewish burial caves that date back to the time of the Second Temple – that bore signs of fresh ash and a recent fire. When he looked inside, Speizer noticed signs that antiquities thieves had been digging there. Nearby, a few human bones were lying exposed, and food and drink wrappers testified to the long hours the unwelcome guests were spending there. A few days later, on another morning run, he found another burial cave in a similar state, and then two more. All around, light fixtures, trash cans, and water faucets had been sabotaged and pulled out of place. And robbers weren't the only ones who wanted to plunder the park – so did drug addicts, alcoholics, and vandals from a nearby Arab village, who made the park a haven after dark. 

Ever since then, Speizer has been documenting dozens of similar antiquities sites all over Jerusalem that suffer from neglect, vandalism, and even ethno-religious sabotage – including some important ones. This is how he began his "120" list, which was recently delivered to Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon. Earlier this month, the Jerusalem City Council also discussed it. Leon, unlike his predecessors, takes the matter seriously and intends to handle it. 

Iמ many aspects, Speizer's list mirrors the National Heritage Survey prepared by the Shiloh Forum and the Shomrim al Hanetzach heritage preservation NGO about the miserable state of heritage sites in Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley. But his addresses Jerusalem, the country's capital, and some of the sites are in the heart of the city. It's hard to understand how they could have been ignored for so long. 

Two weeks ago, Speizer went into the field. The neglect is terrible in almost every part of the city. In Valley of Hinnom, which surrounds Mount Zion and was first mentioned in the Book of Joshua, there are dozens of Jewish burial caves that date back to the Second Temple era. The burial niches in these caves, which face the Second Temple-era wall of Jerusalem recently excavated by Dr. Yehiel Zelinger, were where the elite of the Jewish community, including priests and high priests, were laid to rest starting from the Hasmonean era and through the days of the Second Temple. 

The Akeldama and Yochanan caves are two of the burial caves in the valley. In any other city in the world, they would be tourist attractions for Jewish and Christian visitors. In Christian tradition, Akeldama ("Field of Blood" in Hebrew) is where converts were buried, and was supposedly purchased by the priests with money donated by Judas Iscariot. Instead, the place is marred by remnants of campfires, rusty barbed wire, old metal furniture, and bags emptied of their contents by gangs of thieves, who stay here, too, mostly at night. 

Worse and even more disgraceful is the situation of the Yochanan cave, where according to Christian tradition the High Priest Yochanan, who held the role in the first century CE, is buried. The cave and the ones next to it were excavated by many researchers, including Robert Macalister (prior to the establishment of the state) and major Israeli researchers such as Professor Amos Kloner and Professors Boaz Zissu, Shimon Gibson, and others. At the end of the 19th century, the cave still held ossuaries containing the bones of the dead. Most of them have been stolen. 

A few were researched, and yielded Hebrew names such as Miriam, Esther, and Shimon. Today, a local Arab resident has set up a barred door at the entrance to the Yochanan Cave and turned it into a coop for geese. The area around the cave was illegally fenced, and serves as a grazing area for goats. Not long ago, a camel was also spotted. 

Another neglected Jewish burial cave in the area is adorned with a rectangular relief, similar to one believed to have been part of the Temple. Another cave is decorated with a relief depicting a shell. Another cave has lost most of its front to a power shovel, and human bones lie exposed in it. Not far from there, pottery bottles have been found that used to contain oils and perfumes, which were used during burials to stave off bad smells. 

The burial method employed in the Valley of Hinnom caves was to lay the remains in burial niches, generally in family caves. Once the places of burial had been closed a year, they would be reopened, and the bones of the person would be collected and stored in an ossuary that remained in the cave. The ossuaries, which were sometimes carved with the names of the deceased, would eventually become targets for antiquities thieves. 

Ossuaries are of immense value on the illegal antiquities market, and almost none remain in the caves themselves. Both the Valley of Hinnom and Mount Scopus burial complexes have been consistently robbed over the years, as well as other sites around Jerusalem. 

Zissu, from the Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology Department at Bar-Ilan University, who along with the late Kloner wrote the book The Necropolis of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period, tells Israel Hayom that current research is familiar with about 70 Jewish familial burial caves in and around Jerusalem that date from the second century BCE to 70 CE. Most of them, he says, are covered by residential neighborhoods.

"Only a few caves are still accessible to the public, so it's doubly horrifying that most of them are in such pitiful state," Zissu says. "Apart from them being a major national and scientific asset that the government has an obligation to protect for future generations, it's also an asset for research and tourism. Research tries to study the graves to learn about the city, its homes, its decorations, and to learn from the dead about how they lived." 

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Zissu praises the city's care for the Sanhedria Park, and criticizes what is taking place in Hinnom Valley. He says that the excavation and research potential of the burial system there has not been fully realized. 

"Even the antiquities robbers know it, and there is a real risk that they will bring an electric shovel to Hinnom Valley and start using it there, like we've already experienced," he says, urging the city to allocate funds to protect and maintain the antiquities sites.  

The neglect, the theft, the vandalism, and the ethno-religious attacks do not distinguish between Jewish and Christian sites. The remains of a Byzantine-era monastery from the fifth century CE located on the slopes of Mount Scopus, on the road to Maaleh Adumim, were studied 20 years ago by the Israel Antiquities Authority. The discovery was widely publicized, both in Israel and abroad. 

Now place is abandoned. Not much remains of its mosaic floor, and a visit to one of the large water cisterns showed that it was being used largely as a dump. Speizer, who first visited the site of the monastery a few months ago, saw how local residents were using another nearby cistern as a "graveyard" for the corpses of sheep, cats, and dogs. 

Many of the sites Speizer mapped have already been reviewed as part of a local planning initiative. Even then, most were in poor shape, but about half of the sites were refurbished in the early 2000s. Since then, time has passed and things have gotten worse. Speizer defines these sites as "an educational resources and physical background to understand history. A way of anchoring our roots here. Preservation will allow continued research into the past and will also hand the discoveries over to the generations to come, in acknowledgement of all the generations' shared ownership of the assets of the past." 

The first stage of his proposal calls for the city of Jerusalem, in conjunction with the IAA, to put up signage to make city residents aware of the value of these sites, some of which lie next to or within residential neighborhoods. The second stage calls for personnel to be assigned to oversee the sites and keep them clean. Speizer mentions that in 2010, the city employed a team of preservation and maintenance workers, and thinks it should be reformed. 

He does cite a few bright points: a section of an aqueduct that carried water to Jerusalem in the time of the Second Temple that was discovered on the grounds of a nursery school in the Tsur Baher neighborhood and preserved; a Temple-era mikveh that was recently excavated in the Kidron ravine near a church in Gethsemane, which is under careful supervision; a grave complex dating to the First Temple Era near the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, which is well-maintained; or Hirbt Tel-Arza below Gilo, where the IAA initiated an excavation together with community authorities that revealed a wine press, agricultural facilities, and a mikveh, all from the Second Temple period. 

Some of the sites on Speizer's list are located on the grounds of the national park that surrounds Jerusalem, which is run by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, but most of them are within the Jerusalem municipal boundaries and are the city's responsibility. But the city has lifted a finger for decades. The IAA excavates and studies sites, and decides whether to recover them or leave them exposed, but for the most part does not maintain archaeological sites on its own. 

Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon tells Israel Hayom that the neglect of heritage sites is something that has been ignored for decades, but he intends to meet with head of the IAA Eli Escosido, who reached out to him on the matter, suggesting that they work together to address the issues at the sites Speizer mapped. 

However, Leon says, the city obviously doesn't have the funds to maintain all the antiquities sites within its borders. "But if, for example, we're talking about reforming the preservation team run jointly by the city and the IAA, at reasonable costs that will allow these important antiquities sites to be addressed, I believe we'll manage to come up with a budget, municipal or from the national government, to fund this national mission.

"A people that does not honor its past – as my predecessors have said – has a drab present and future. This is an issued that united coalition and opposition in Jerusalem, and I intend to take care of it," Leon says. 

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A small clay tablet dating back 3,500 years and bearing a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh that was looted from an Iraqi museum 30 years ago and recently recovered from the United States formally returned to Iraq on Tuesday.

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The $1.7 million cuneiform tablet, known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, is one of the world's oldest surviving works of literature and one of the oldest religious texts. It was found in 1853 as part of a 12-tablet collection in the rubble of the library of Assyrian King Assur Banipal.

The tablet was looted from an Iraqi museum during the 1991 Gulf War. Officials believe it was illegally imported into the United States in 2003, then sold to Hobby Lobby and eventually put on display in its Museum of the Bible in Washington. Federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations seized the tablet from the museum in September 2019. A federal judge in New York approved the forfeiture of the tablet in July this year.

On Tuesday, the tablet was handed over to Iraqi authorities in a ceremony at Iraq's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the presence of UNESCO officials as well as Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein and Hassan Nadhem, Iraq's minister of culture, tourism and antiquities.

"We were able to recover about 17,926 artifacts from several countries, namely America, Britain, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands," Hussein said.

UNESCO has described the process of recovering the valuable artifact as the culmination of decades of cooperation between the US and Iraq, both of which are signatories to the UNESCO Convention of 1970.

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At the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire set out to recruit new soldiers to join its army, including thousands of young Jewish men who lived in Baghdad.

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Instead of sending their men to join the imperial forces, the Jewish community paid authorities to get them exempt. Prominent leader at the time, Rabbi Shelomo Bekhor Ḥutzin, documented the names of everyone who received an exemption.

In the decades to follow, many of those names morphed or disappeared as the Jews living there dispersed across the world. But Hutzin's documents survived and are now stored and are available to the public in The National Library of Israel.

Foreign Ministry diplomat Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch has taken it upon himself to read and translate all 3,500 names on the list.

He has dedicated years of his life to researching Middle Eastern Jewish surnames that have been lost over the generations. Rosen-Koenigsbuch has published lists of family names from Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Alexandria. The four lists have been combined into this searchable database.

Rosen-Koenigsbuch, who used to be an Israeli ambassador to Jordan between 2006 and 2009, began researching Jewish surnames common to the 19th-century Middle East after exploring his family history in Poland.

"My parents were Holocaust survivors," he said. "And they didn't speak. My father was completely silent."

He began lecturing on what he learned from researching his heritage, and audience members kept approaching him to find out about their own family history.

"I would hear this mantra," he said. "We don't know anything about our families because we left Egypt or Syria or Iraq in a hurry. We left everything behind and the archives are closed. We came out alive from those countries, but the documents are not with us. In Europe, most of the Jews were annihilated but the archives are open.'"

Rosen-Koenigsbuch was fluent in Arabic, so he began to research documents from the area, despite limited access to archives. He decided to focus on family names in particular and discovered thousands of them in journals, directories, circumcision records, and court documents.

"There are many limitations, but we have to try to gather the history because we still have among us people in their 70s, early 80s and in 10 years there will be no one to talk to," Rosen-Koenigsbuch said. "If we will not hurry they will be gone. It's a very important message to encourage people to start thinking about this."

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The grand, 500-year-old brick walls of the al-Kamalaia School slowly emerged from years of accumulated garbage as grassroots preservers began the long process of restoring it to its former glory.

Located in the heart of the old quarter of Gaza City, the Mamluk-era building is one of an ever-dwindling number of historic structures at risk of demolition.

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"It was in a very difficult, pitiful state. It was a dump, said Abdullah al-Ruzzi, an artist and leading volunteer.

Al-Ruzzi and other artists launched the Mobaderoon, or Initiators, program, seeking to save abandoned houses and buildings from two periods of Gaza's history: the Mamluk Sultanate and the subsequent Ottoman Empire.

In the old section of the Palestinian enclave, fewer than 200 houses from these eras are partially or entirely standing, according to tourist officials. They are threatened by neglect, decay or even demolition by new urban development.

"Lack of public awareness and the economic considerations by owners are the greatest threats to these buildings," said Ahmed al-Astal, director of Iwan, the history and heritage institute of Gaza's Islamic University. "These houses are our identity, but ignorance leads to their destruction."

Because the Gaza Strip is small, with 2 million people living in just 300 square kilometers (115 square miles), the experts and volunteers fear that structures of past centuries will disappear, like those from far more ancient civilizations.

Population growth, conflict with Israel and mismanagement by Hamas have contributed to the erasure of many signs of Gaza's five millennia of history. The territory has been enriched by its prime location along the route connecting ancient Egypt, the Levant and Mesopotamia. For example, Hamas bulldozers destroyed large parts of a rare 4,500-year-old Bronze Age settlement to make way for a housing project.

Mobaderoon is one of a handful of organizations seeking to preserve ancient sites in Gaza City. But their efforts are typically limited in scope and lack systematic plans.

It took the team two weeks to remove the trash from the al-Kamalaia school, which is named after a Mamluk sultan. Each day, young men and women gather there, sweeping the dusty floor, brushing the bricks and supporting windows with wood frames.

Once the renovation is completed, al-Ruzzi says the goal is to convert the building into a venue for cultural and artistic activities because such facilities are few in Gaza.

"This is the only school that still maintains its architectural standing, it still has classrooms. It's clear that this school was used until a recent time in education and memorizing the Quran because it's in the old city," said Jamal Abu Rida, director of the archaeology department in Gaza's Tourism Ministry.

Residents of Gaza are preoccupied with financial woes, struggling with a 13-year-old Israeli-Egyptian blockade, and combatting a raging coronavirus outbreak that has overwhelmed the health system. Campaigns to protect heritage and archaeological sites are not top priorities, but are welcomed.

"The initiatives are very important because their goal is to preserve the cultural legacy," said al-Astal.

A few blocks from the school, a different team is working on renovating a house, the Ghussein palace, named after the family that has owned it for 200 years. The workers scraped the bricks to remove layers of dust that hid their features. Others took measurements for the door frames.

The work began on this home in August and is scheduled to be complete in January. "It was left for a long time and has a lot of cracks and problems," said Nashwa Ramlawi, the architect leading the restoration.

"The place has a great heritage and cultural value. We will dedicate it for anything that serves the community; a cultural, service or social center open to everyone," Ramlawi said.

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Four water-dropping planes and two helicopters helped dozens of firefighters contain the blaze Sunday after it reached the fringes of one of Greece's most important archaeological sites, 120 kilometers (75 miles) southwest of Athens.

"The damage caused by yesterday's fire was the least possible," Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said.

"Smoke blackened some walls," Mendoni added. "The problem is [only] aesthetic."

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These numbers horrified the members of the nonprofit Yom Kippur War Center. It made clear what they had already suspected – that the worst war in Israel's history was being forgotten. That the price paid in it was being taken for granted, and that its legacy was non-existent, and that if the story of the war – and their own stories – weren't told now, it would never be told, as the generation who fought it is dying off. The current General Staff of the IDF doesn't include a single general who enlisted in the military prior to 1973, and only 12 currently serving MKs fought in it.

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A group of Yom Kippur War veterans is trying to change the narrative and inculcate a different kind of discourse and a more accurate memory of what happened here 46 years ago. Supposedly, it should be obvious; in actuality, it's a Sisyphean and very Israeli task in which common sense fights bureaucracy. Every citizen should hope that intelligence and justice beat the functionaries to allow the right thing to be done, even if it's very late in coming.

Only two hours before

Rami Swet is a story. A personal story, a family story, the story of a generation. His parents, Zvi and Ruth, made aliyah from Europe before World War II. They lost their entire families in the Holocaust and both enlisted in the British Army – Zvi was a commando, Ruth was a nurse. They met in a hospital after Ruth was called in to translate for a wounded Israeli, and they married after the war. They settled down near Negba and built a ranch.

Later, the parents moved on to the new Afeka neighborhood in north Tel Aviv. After the 1967 Six-Day War they moved to Nuweiba in Sinai, where they owned a gas station. They had five children, three boys and two girls. All the boys served in the IDF Armored Corps and the girls went to the Medical Corps and army human resource management.

The Yom Kippur War found the Swets scattered in various locations. Micky, the eldest son, had finished his time as a company commander and had been sent to university at the army's expense. He was with his wife, who was about to give birth. Yair, the middle son, was a platoon commander in the 77^th Battalion under Avigdor Kahalani [who would later serve as IDF chief of staff] and just about to be discharged. Rami, the youngest son, was a newly-minted officer and was serving as a teacher in the course for tank commanders.

"The eve of the war, all three of us were called up to the front," Rami recalls. "Yair's battalion, which had been in the Sinai, was moved up to the Golan front. Micky ran to the emergency supply unit and left for Sinai. I was called up with an ad hoc battalion from the Armored Corps training school to the Golan Heights, and we got to an area we weren't really familiar with. We got maps just two hours before the war broke out."

Rami's war didn't begin when the siren sounded, but with four Syrian fighter jets that were on their way to the Israeli command in Nafakh on the Golan Heights, and attacked him and his comrades, as well. "I knew that Yair was in the area, too, but I didn't know exactly where. Only later I learned that when I was near Hermonit and north of it, he was 500 meters [550 yards] away from me in the Beqaa Valley."

Rami's battalion was trying to stop Syrian incursions in the area between Hermonit and Tel Varda, but because they were an informal, inexperienced battalion unfamiliar with the territory, it fell apart as quickly as it had been formed after the commander and deputy commander were both killed.

"I was wounded on the fourth day of the war. The first time was at Hermonit from shrapnel, and then when the tank was hit – a wound that caused me to lose my vision temporarily," Rami says.

At the hospital, he met other wounded. Naturally, the conversation centered around their experiences, and one of the wounded next to him said his company commander had been killed. Someone asked what the commander's name was, and the wounded man answered, "Swet." That was the first time Rami learned that his brother Yair had been killed, but he refused to acknowledge it. After he was released from the hospital he was sent back to the Golan Heights. At Nafakh, he met his brother's deputy and realized what had happened.

Q: How was Yair killed?

"He was killed on Oct. 7, the second day of the war, in battles to stop [the Syrians] on the Golan. The team that was in front of him on the slope was hit, and the soldiers jumped out of the tank. Yair left the turret and got down to pick them up, and during the rescue he took a direct mortar hit and was killed. His team was traumatized and abandoned the tank because they thought the tank had been hit, too. They got back to it only three hours later. It was still running, with Yair's body inside it, and they got him out."

Yair Swet was posthumously awarded the Medal of Distinguished Service for his part in the battle. The background for his medal states that "He hit enemy tanks at close ranges of 200-500 meters, and caused the enemy heavy losses. As the battle continued, one of his company's tank was hit, and the crew was seen jumping out. Lt. Yair Swet approached the crew to see what had happened, and when he stopped, he was hit and killed. Lt. Yair Swet served as an outstanding example of courage and coolness under pressure for the entire company, and inspired the soldiers to hold their ground and continue fighting."

Rami saw all this unfold from a few hundred yards away but didn't know that Yair was part of it. He also didn't know that his older brother Micky had been wounded in battles in Sinai.

"We rolled down to Sinai, to the northern edge of the [Suez] Canal," Micky says.

"When we got to the highway, I turned to the west to identify where the Egyptian enemy was and approach them. Our tanks and armored vehicles that had been hit were burned and blackened at the side of the road, and immediately we realized that this war would be very, very different. An APC carrying soldiers on compulsory service came in my direction and I spotted the commander. I asked him, 'Where are our forces, and where's the enemy?' His answer was tough and dry: 'Our forces are done – everything ahead of you is just the enemy.'"

Micky took part in the large-scale offense, which failed, continued southward, and then was sent back to the main front.

"The battle started when we were under cover, and later on we ambushed the target. The battalion commander, with two companies, was fighting on the left flank of an Egyptian infantry force that was entrenched and aided by tanks. I was fighting on the right flank at short range, facing gunfire, grenades, and risking being run over by tank treads. Besides the fierce fighting, the radio informed us that all three platoon commanders had been hit, myself included. When the brigade commander's tank was hit, he handed command of the battalion over to me and got it out of the way."

"Because my tank had been hit too, in the motor, and black smoke was coming out, I told the battalion to move on while I marked the route as a smoke column. When the battalion was rescued, my team managed to put out the tank fire, and all the wounded were evacuated to a makeshift battalion regroup point."

Micky himself, who also received the Medal of Distinguished Service for his conduct in battle, was taken to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, where he read the human resources report about the identities of the wounded, including the name of his dead brother, Yair, and his wounded brother, Rami.

How to tell the parents?

At Nafakh, Rami was given Yair's personal effects: a book of phone numbers, his bullets, and a few other things. He wanted to go back to the fighting, but was denied for fear his family would sustain two casualties. He also learned that his older brother had been wounded and went to visit him in Jerusalem. "I tell him what happened to Yair, and we decide that we have to tell our parents."

Micky couldn't leave the hospital, so Rami went to his parents' house alone and informed his mother and sister.

"My mom had two requests. One, that even though 10 minutes earlier I'd told her she had lost a son, that I go back to the front, because 'I wouldn't be able to look my friends in the eye,' and second, that before I did that, I find my father and tell him."

Rami went to Sinai, where his father had remained to keep the family gas station running for the war effort. "Dad made a tear in my jumpsuit, gave me a hug, and said, 'Go to the front.'"

Rami did as his parents told him to, went back to his original unit from the tank officers' training course, and continued to fight in Sinai as a tank platoon commander as far south as Suez.

Q: Your parents were tough.

"It was a different generation. Mom refused to come to the medal ceremony to accept Yair's. She wrote that medals weren't for the parents. I always argued that, sadly, only soldiers get medals and not mothers."

Yair was given a battlefield burial during the war. Only two months after the war was over did the family first visit a cemetery, and on the one-year anniversary of his death, Yair was reinterred on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, "because our parents had been thinking about going to live in the Jewish Quarter, and wanted to be close to him."

Rami's father died 20 years ago. His mother died eight years ago. In the 2006 Second Lebanon War he was forced to bring her sad news again and report that her grandson, his sister's son, had died. "She said that she hoped my sister would be able to cry, which she hadn't."

Q: Your parents didn't cry?

"They cried in secret. With the door closed. My father was very bitter about Yair being killed. He saw the government and the army as traitors who sent children to be slaughtered like lambs."

Q: Was he right?

"Professor Asa Kasher said at the founding conference of our group that the country has an obligation not only to defend its citizens, but also to defend its soldiers. Today it's clear to everyone that things could have been done differently, and that we were asked to stand on the front in unrealistic conditions that dictated that we would have 2,673 casualties and over 11,000 wounded in the war."

'More is still being kept secret'

Despite the grief and the anger, Micky and Rami continued to serve in the army. Micky served as a battalion commander and later on as a division commander in the reserves, and Rami went on to two battalion commander roles – including the first battalion of Merkava tanks – until he was discharged in 1983. After that, he remained a reservist for another 20 years. "It was clear to us that we need to be part of the [post-war] rehabilitation," he says.

But the war has never left him. Two years ago he decided, along with a group of friends, to establish the Yom Kippur War Center, a nonprofit organization that would work not only to keep the memory of the war alive, but also to teach its legacy.

"It was the most significant event in the history of the country since independence. A war that threatened its existence, in which the entire population took part," he says.

Q: Why now?

"Because our generation has undergone a process of internalization and silence, and like our parents and grandparents didn't want to talk about the Holocaust, it didn't talk, either. We have a moral obligation to pass it on."

The organization plans to build an active center that will focus on four different goals: making information accessible, telling the story of the war, documentation and research, and serving as a center to commemorate heroism in the war. They hope it will be recognized as a national heritage site, like Ammunition Hill. The city of Netanya has already allocated land for the center, which will be built at an estimated cost of $30 million. The organization intends to promote a cabinet bill to expedite the processes to build the center and have it recognized as a heritage site, with the hope that in the future all IDF soldiers and schoolchildren will visit it on organized trips.

The group now boasts some 3,000 members, most of whom fought in the war. Rami Swet is the chairman, and he has set a goal of starting construction this coming year, with a projected opening date of October 2023 – exactly 50 years after the war broke out.

"This war hasn't gotten the respect it deserves. Even today, more about it is secret than is known. We are about to petition the High Court of Justice to force the government to release material about the war," he says.

Q: Like what?

"The Agranat Commission Report dealt with only one point – who was responsible for the [war's] failures. It didn't research the war. Most of the relevant documents are still classified. It's absurd – if I want to know what's happening in Iran, I turn on the news, but if I want to know what happened with the air force on Yom Kippur I get a file that is mostly redacted."

Swet says that the government has 23,000 documents on file that are waiting to be declassified, and that the IDF also has a wealth of information that is still secret.

Aside from the mission of commemoration, the group wants to change the way people talk about the war from the focus on failure to a discussion of heroism and victory.

"It's not that there weren't problems, but that's not the main thing. Take the data from the start and from the end. There's no army that could have turned things around and led to a victory like that. The army rose to the occasion, and the army isn't the top level of the government. The soldiers were the ones who won the war, and that's something we have to instill in people's minds. And that's even discounting that it was the only war that has led to a peace treaty."

Q: Why the urgency to do this?

"I wear three different hats: someone who fought and was wounded in the war; someone who was bereaved; and someone who now sees what is happening in the Israeli public. This event ended and was forgotten as if it was some minor episode in Israel's history."

The post 'The most important event since independence' appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

The city, which dates back to the Early Bronze Age (the end of the fourth millennium BCE), was surrounded by walls and included residential and public areas, streets and alleyways. It had an area of 650 dunams (0.25 square miles) and was home to an estimated 6,000 residents.

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The Bronze Age metropolis was constructed on the remains of an even earlier city that dates back 7,000 years to the Chalcolithic Period. Two natural springs located nearby apparently served as the impetus to build planned communities on the site.

Some 5,000 teens and volunteers took part in the excavation under the auspices of an IAA project designed to instill an emotional connection to Israel's ancient heritage and a sense of belonging in the younger generations, as well as awareness of the importance of archaeological preservation.

IAA archaeologists Itai Elad, Dr. Yitzhak Paz, and Dr. Dina Shalem, who directed the dig, said there was "no doubt" that the findings would dramatically change what researchers knew about the Early Bronze Age and the beginnings of urbanization in Canaan.

"This was an exciting time in the history of the land, which was then Canaan, and whose populations underwent changes that changed the face of [the land] entirely. The rural population gave way to a complex society, most of whom lived in urban settings," the archaeologists said.

Video: Israel Antiquities Authority

"These were the first steps the Canaanite culture took in the land of Israel, which took on its own character in the urban sites it founded. … A city like this could not have arisen without someone to plan it and an administrative mechanism that was responsible for its construction. The impressive planning and the fact that tools imported to [Canaan] from Egypt and seals have been discovered at the site are testimony of that.

'There was an enormous city here – a megalopolis in Early Bronze Age terms, where thousands of people lived, making a living from agriculture and who traded with other regions and even other cultures and kingdoms in the area."

Discoveries at the ancient city include an unusually large temple that features a giant stone basin used in religious rites and an altar on which burned animal bones were unearthed, proof of animal sacrifices. The dig also turned up rare idols, including one of a human head.

The surprising discoveries allow researchers to characterize the culture of the peoples who lived in the area in earlier times. The nearby springs and open spaces facilitated agriculture. The remains of the homes and public structures indicate an organized society with a clear hierarchy.

Like so many archaeological discoveries, the city was unearthed as part of the preliminary infrastructure work – in this case, preparations to construct a new highway interchange providing an exit to the newly-developed city Harish, funded by the Israel National Roads Company Ltd.

Confronted with an unexpected ancient "New York," Israel National Roads has changed its plans for the highway and will build an overpass over the site to allow the city to be preserved in situ so researchers can continue to delve into its secrets.

The post Thousands of teens help excavate Bronze Age 'megalopolis' in northern Israel appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.