Tag: Jon Seligman

"The ring may have belonged to the owner of the warehouse, to a foreman, or to an unlucky visitor who dropped it."

It appears that the town of Yavne, home to the Sanhedrin in exile after the destruction of the Second Temple, became a worldwide powerhouse of wine production some 1,500 years ago.

A few years ago, Dr. Jon Seligman's visit to Vilna as part of a roots trip sparked the idea of digging up what was left of the compound and the synagogue.

How did the egg end up in the cesspit? We'll never know.

During the work, the site will be open to the public, enabling visitors to watch the conservation process and the gradual uncovering of the mosaic floor.

This year's excavation uncovered large sections of the bimah, which was originally two stories tall, and was built in the 18th century with a donation from the rich and well-connected Yesod (Yehudah Safra ve-Dayana).

"A small, rural mosque, dated to the 7th to 8th centuries CE, is a rare find anywhere in the world."

This important and magnificent synagogue was the center of study of the Vilna Gaon. In recent weeks, a delegation of archaeologists has uncovered two of the compound's ritual baths.

For the first time since the Holocaust the famous tunnel used by the prisoners of Ponar to escape from the Nazis had been located using new technologies for underground predictive scanning.