Book Week Campaign

Fundraising, Fun, and Free Stuff

HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT:

Our main goal right now is to raise the money to be able to publish our own series of books about our research on the Temple Mount. So – in honor of Hebrew Book Week we are doing fun things, fundraising, and giving away free stuff.

1. Follow us on Facebook and share our Book Week Campaign Video. On June 25^th we will choose one person who shared the video this week and give them a FREE 40 page book about the Sifting Project, our finds and research with full color pictures. It is great to show off to your friends.

2. DONATE to our campaign THIS WEEK. If you donate over $50 or ₪200, in addition to the gifts you automatically receive, we are adding in FREE SIFTING for you and your family. (This promotion is good for one time use, up to 5 people, and is good for one year).

3. Follow our Facebook page or Twitter feed this week and get a Recommended Book of the Day from our fantastic staff. Books on the Temple Mount, Archaeology, and Israel. Get your library cards out and your amazon account activated because you won’t want to miss this. At the end of the week, I will also make a new blog post with the complete list.

How Else Can You Help?

If you can’t give to our campaign, help us network and connect with people who might be able to support our goal of publishing our finds. Please share our story and let people know that the work we are doing is unprecedented and has the potential of adding an immense amount of knowledge to our understanding of the Temple Mount and Jerusalem. Without publication, it will be as if our thousands of finds had never been found and our work over the last 11 years hadn’t happened. The dialogue about the Temple Mount needs our research, and we need YOU to help spread the word.

Thank You

Advertisement

“On the first of the month of Adar a proclamation is made about the [giving of the] shekalim …” (Shekalim 1:1)

We are still very far from the goal of funding the full publication of the finds from Sifting Project. We still don’t understand the significance of most them. Publishing these artifacts will shed more light on the long history of this sacred site, and hopefully contribute to the resolution of many debates related to this site.

We could reach this goal only with the help of the large crowd who supports this project.
Please help share and distribute this video.

The Half-Shekel Campaign – Summary and Conclusions

First and foremost, we would like to express our deep gratitude to all those who answered our call and donated to the project and helped disseminate the Campaign. YOUR SUPPORT IS TRULY APPRECIATED. Thank you letters and gifts will be mailed shortly.

Our” Half-Shekel” campaign was launched on September 1^st 2015 and lasted for four months. The Temple Mount Sifting Project is all about involving the community, and this campaign was the first time we invited the public to partake in helping fund the project. We chose the crowd funding approach, even though we didn’t know what to expect. This kind of platform, when used by non-profit organizations, is often used to help fund and promote social, medical or political causes, and usually not used for scientific research, let alone for archaeological research although many people find interest and value in it, they still prefer to donate to other causes.

We produced a video with an attempt to tell the story of the sifting project in an interesting and touching way for those who are less-acquainted with the story of the Temple Mount, its history and archaeology, as well as for those who are well acquainted and even for trained archaeologists. We knew that a short video would be essential for it to   become viral, but we weren’t successful   in finding  a way to  consolidate  the story of the project  in addition to explaining our financial needs to the non-aquatint in less than 7 minutes although we managed to have the Hebrew version shorter (5 min).

Eventually the Hebrew video became viral to some extend on Facebook and managed to reach 20 thousand people quite quickly with almost no paid promotion (a total of 27 thousand on both Facebook and YouTube). The English version, which was also available with translation subtitles in many languages, was less successful and eventually reached 50 thousand people (16 thousand people have visited the Half-Shekel Campaign website and more than 270 of them have donated. During the time of this campaign, we eventually managed to raise $35,440.  The donations came mainly from English speaking countries and from Israel, but also from distant parts of the world such as Brazil, Chile, Singapore and other places.

A short while after the inception of the campaign, the political conflict concerning the Temple Mount became a hot topic in the media, and we weren’t sure if it detracted or motivated support of the campaign. We prefer avoiding politics   as much as possible, especially since we are dealing with the most politically sensitive site in Israel, although certain aspects of our research may unavoidably have some political implications. The website has also been translated into Arabic, and attracted a relatively large percentage of visits from Arabic speaking countries, surprisingly, we received only few malicious comments, while hundreds of visitors shared the website and clicked like. Perhaps the scientifically oriented nature of the text helped to some extend to reduce the conflict fed by decisive and ignorant historical claims.

We are still far from reaching the project’s needs, and our funding efforts will proceed. This website will be maintained as a permanent funding website, and we will continue promoting it in various other ways.

You are all invited to continue supporting the project by sending a recurring donation and by sharing the websites of the Temple Mount Sifting Project.

With much gratitude,

Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Dvira