On Sunday afternoon I went to a funeral here at Ein Harod. I'm not a compulsive funeral-goer, however, living in a tightly-knit community I feel duty bound to go to most funerals. While listening to the eulogies being read I looked beyond the row of Cyprus trees that demarcates the cemetery from the field beyond it. It was a scene Thomas Gray could have described.
Admittedly this shady enclave beside the avocado grove is far removed from Gray’s country churchyard. Our lowing herd never grazes in the lea or leaves the confines of the cow sheds. Moreover the ploughman in the field beyond the Cyprus trees had just turned the last furrow with a reversible double mouldboard plough drawn by a John Deere tractor and had headed home. Just the same, our cemetery has a definite rustic atmosphere.
It was opened forty three years ago and is Ein Harod’s third cemetery. The first cemetery was started near Gideon’s Spring in 1922 and was closed in 1938. The second cemetery is still in use and is a follow-on from the one by the spring. It was opened in Ein Harod Meuchad in 1938. Our current cemetery serves Ein Harod Ihud and was opened because space constrictions in the neighbouring kibbutz required a new burial site.
As the coffin was lowered into the grave I recalled an incident regarding our local Judaism study circle. The circle meets at Kibbutz Geva every Wednesday evening throughout the year except for a recess during the summer . Between two and three hundred people attend the circle’s lectures, most of us are secular Jews. Last week our lecturer Professor Uriel Simon was stuck in a traffic jam at the Megiddo junction. While we were waiting for him to arrive, we passed the time telling jokes, recounting anecdotes and personal experiences. One of our group, a retired drainage engineer, told about an amazing discovery he made a few years ago when he was working with a drainage installation team near Beit Shearim. The trenching machine they were working with struck a hard object. At first they thought it was a rock; however after digging around it they saw that they had unearthed a sarcophagus. They notified the local branch of the Israel antiquities department and a few hours later an archeologist arrived at the site to verify and identify the object they had found. After examining the sarcophagus’ external features he opened the lid hoping to find objects that would help in dating the find. Often damage caused by grave robbers and the ravages of time leave little of interest for the archeologists However in this instance the work team and the archeologist were surprised to find a complete skeleton inside the stone coffin. Later the department of antiquities established that the skeleton was an 18 year old male who had died about 1700-1800 years ago.
News of the sarcophagus reached the rabbi at Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu and he offered to bury the remains of the ancient John Doe in the kibbutz cemetery. When told there was no evidence to suggest that the deceased was Jewish the rabbi replied that even if there was doubt regarding his identity he should be given the benefit of the doubt and a full Jewish burial.
That certainly wasn't a "ground breaking" precedent. The Ministry of Religious Affairs has always been over zealous about burying old bones even when there was clear evidence that the bones belonged to pagans or at the best to Christians. Perhaps the most famous case of post mortem conversions involved the skeletons found at Masada.
The Masada bones discovered by Yigael Yadin between 1963 and 1965 and later given a state burial by the Israeli government were not those of Jewish patriots but Roman soldiers, says Joseph Zias , who was Curator of Archaeology and Anthropology for the Israel Antiquities Authority from 1972 to 1997.
Zias says that Yadin had doubts about the identification of the skeletons, but was coerced by Israeli political leaders to connect the bones with the Masada saga and agree to give them a state funeral.
Likewise, the Israel Antiquities Authority transferred bones exhumed from graves near Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital to the Religious Affairs Ministry in May last year . The ancient graves were excavated to prepare for the construction of a new emergency room. Archaeologists dated the graves from the Roman-Byzantine period and said they belonged to pagans.
Another team of archaeologists uncovered tombs near Andromeda Hill in Jaffa earlier this year. The team’s spokesperson said that bones found at the site belong to pagan worshippers and were buried next to domesticated pigs. These bones too (the human bones) were given a Jewish burial.
At the time of the Jerusalem trip I mentioned in a letter two weeks ago we visited the Hinnom shoulder necropolis, burial caves dating back to the time of the First Temple. At that time and later on the poor were buried in the ground and the well-heeled folk were interred in a family crypt, usually a burial cave. The phrase in Judges 2:10 ".. all that generation were gathered unto their fathers…" meaning they had died, has an additional meaning. The crypt or cave was limited in size so the bones of the previous generation were gathered from the stone slabs where the bodies had been placed and stacked in an ossuary, a nearby repository. Ossuaries of this type were found at the Hinnom shoulder necropolis and in other places.
By coincidence Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in the Beit Shean Valley enters this narrative again. A few weeks ago I was asked to take a couple from the kibbutz to visit the old cemetery by Gideon’s Spring. For many years the cemetery was almost forgotten, I dare to say neglected. It is not a national landmark like the Kinneret cemetery; however it embodies Ein Harod’s early history. The inscriptions on the austere headstones and sometimes the spacing between some of the graves have a special significance. A few years ago it was reopened to serve a nearby community.
Of the 61 graves in the older part of the cemetery 11 of them are children’s graves. The average age of the adults buried there is 25.8 years. The cause of death is usually mentioned on the headstones. Twenty pioneers who committed suicide are buried in the cemetery. Sometimes a blatant “took his own life,” or three initial letters indicate that they killed themselves.
Typhus, malaria, work accidents and other causes account for the rest of the fatalities. The harsh inhospitable conditions that prevailed in the pioneer community combined with the fear of failure, even unrequited love have been attributed as the cause of many of the suicides.
The second and third cemeteries accommodate fewer suicides and less drama.
I set out to avoid the depressing Iranian crisis, local domestic crises like the ongoing doctors strike and other bad news. I now realise that my morbid digression brings little cheer, so I will conclude with a few remarks about Iran.
Repercussions of the mysterious explosion at an Iranian military installation last Saturday reverberated long after the debris and dust had settled.
At first the incident was described as a mishap. However when the name of Brigadier General. Hassan Moghadam, was listed among the people killed in the explosion it was clear that careless handling of munitions wasn't the real cause of the explosion. Until his death Moghadam headed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) missile development and sections of its nuclear programme.
US blogger Richard Silverstein claims the Mossad in collaboration with the MEK, an Iranian militant opposition group, was behind the explosion.
Time Magazine's man in Jerusalem reported that, "Israeli newspapers on Sunday were thick with innuendo, the front pages of the three largest dailies dominated by variations on the headline "Mysterious Explosion in Iranian Missile Base." Turn the page, and the mystery is answered with a wink. 'Who Is Responsible for Attacks on the Iranian Army?' asks Maariv, and the paper lists without further comment a half-dozen other violent setbacks to Iran's nuclear and military nexus. For Israeli readers, the coy implication is that their own government was behind Saturday's massive blast just outside Tehran. It is an assumption a Western intelligence source insists is correct: the Mossad — the Israeli agency charged with covert operations — did it. "
So far the Israeli government has neither confirmed nor denied claims that the Mossad was involved in the explosion.
When Minister of Defence Ehud Barak was asked by a reporter to comment on the explosion all he said was “I hope there will be more.”
Have a good weekend
Beni 17th of November, 2011.
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