Channukkah Miracles at the Sifting Project

Hey everyone! I love the holiday of Channukkah. Maybe it’s because I grew up in secular America so it was always an important holiday in my house, but now living here in Jerusalem, I love the way the whole city lights up with candles in the windows and there are donuts literally everywhere. It is one of those things unique to Israel that makes this holiday even more special.

Channukkah is also a holiday of miracles. I know I already wrote one post about Channukkah, but I got Zachi to go on a rant about the miracle finds of the first year of our project and I can’t not share it with all of you.

There were a number of symbolic finds in the first year of the project. For example, the first coin to be found by the project was a coin from the Jewish revolt against the Romans that says, “For the Freedom of Zion.” Zion is the ancient name for the Temple Mount and this coin encouraged the Sifting Project founders to continue with their important work “freeing” the history of Zion from the dirt. On Channukkah, the project found their first Hashmonian oil lamp, dating to the same time period as the Channukkah story, and the project’s first arrowhead was found on the 10th of Tevet which is the day that commemorates the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzer.

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Let’s Play A Game

Name That Find!

As a part of our Crowdfunding Campaign / Pre-Channukkah Fun / We had a staff meeting and everyone was in the office at the same time so I could take videos of them, we are playing a new game.

Can you identify this object? To me it looks like ancient PAC-MAN or maybe Jack Skellington from the Nightmare Before Christmas.

??????

Please leave your answer in the comments and tune in next week to find out if you were right!

Help Find the Owner!

We don’t usually do this because our artifacts belong to the State of Israel, but we are turning to Social Media to find the owner of this gold bracelet. It was lost on the Temple Mount at some point before 1999 and found in our sifting. Based on the name and style, it is modern and the owner may still be out there! Share this picture and this post so that we can find the owner. (We covered the name on it so that the owner can prove that it is theirs.)

Details: 10K gold. A girl’s name written in English letters. It is very small and may have belonged to a child. It was lost on the Temple Mount before 1999.

The bracelet is worth about $100. Maybe we will find the owner and then they’ll support our research in thanks!

(The shekel is to show scale.)