After four decades, model finds a new home adjacent to the Shrine of the Book.
By ETGAR LEFKOVITSsecond tample model 88(photo credit: )
On a crest of Jerusalem's Hill of Tranquility
overlooking the Valley of the Cross, the Knesset, the Supreme Court, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the National Library, a model of the Second Temple has been relocated adjacent to the Shrine of the Book on the campus of the Israel Museum, in a spot where history and archeology intersect.
The Second Temple Model, which was located for the
last four decades since its construction in the mid 1960's on the grounds of Jerusalem's Holyland Hotel, was moved to the Israel Museum this winter due to the construction of a new residential complex on the slopes of the city's Holyland hill.
The model, an exceptional cultural artifact depicting Jerusalem of two millennia ago, was created before the reunification of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War at a time when Jews could not go to the Old City or the Temple Mount.
For the last 40 years, it primarily served as a
tourist site, with about 300,000 visitors flocking to see the Second Temple Model annually.
A year and half ago, one of the owners of the Holyland property, Hillel Cherni, approached the Israel Museum with a quandary: where to relocate the model due to the planned commercial redevelopment of its site.
Cherni, who had approached several other institutions first, was not at all sure that the internationally-renowned Israel Museum would even be interested in the model.
"We seized the opportunity from the first moment,"
Museum Director James Snyder said Wednesday in an
interview.
Just around that time, museum officials had been
working on plans for the construction of a $2.5
million underground study center for the Dead Sea
Scrolls, adjacent to the recently restored and
redesigned Shrine of the Book, which houses the
Scrolls.
The Scrolls are the oldest surviving Biblical texts.
The four-decade old Shrine of the Book, which is
located on the periphery of the museum campus, was
situated next to an undeveloped empty tract of
landscape, which slopes down substantially.
With the sudden surprise offer to house the Second
Temple Model, museum officials knew that was the spot to house the Model.
"We have just the place," they told him, pointing to the spot on an aerial photograph of the 20 acre museum campus.
"It was like some divine force wanted the site to
remain dormant," Snyder said.
After consulting with preservation, stone and
transportation experts, the model itself was moved to the Israel Museum this winter on a flat-bed truck in 1000 pieces, many of which were 1 square meter, he said.
The flat-bed truck carried about 20 pieces of the
model a day in the five or six daily trips it made
daily to and from the Holyland Hotel site 5 km away, Museum Deputy Director Dor Lin said.
The experts had said that the cutting of the model and its transportation would take about five months, he added.
Instead, much to the surprise of museum officials,
the job was completed in a mere 66 days.
A year and a half after the unexpected offer was made, the museum is currently putting the finishing touches on the Second Temple Model restoration project, which it received without charge.
An overlook above the model on the museum grounds
offers the viewer the perspective of looking down at the city as it was 2,000 years ago, before the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, just as one were to look down on the Temple Mount from the Mount of Olives.
Snyder said that he conceives that the Model, in its new location next to the Dead Sea Scrolls, will be more than just a tourist destination, but will be elevated to the standing of a cultural artifact that intersects archeology and history.
"The site offers a three dimensional illustration of this period in history, and to what the scrolls are and to what archeology in Israel is," he said. "It connects between the scrolls as documents and the timeline of archeological history that our galleries display."
Museum officials decided to leave untouched excavated stone at the site to give a subliminal message of how archeology of the city grew out of its landscape.
"The combination of the Shrine of the Book and the
Second Temple Model along with the Dead Sea Scrolls Study Center is a winning combination that is bound to become a must-see for anyone visiting Jerusalem," Lin said.
About 550,000 people are expected to visit the Israel Museum this year, down from the museum's peak year in 1999, before the outbreak of Palestinian violence, when 820,000 visitors passed through its doors, he added.
The site, which is completely accessible for the
handicapped, will open to the public on June 12, and, like the Shrine of the Book, will be included in the price of the museum admission.
The official opening of the site, along with the new study center, which will offer a 15-minute
fictionalized historical film, will take place on July 5.
