Monday, June 10, 2013

Berko Park

TRAVEL PIECE: Berko Park, aka ancient Tiberias: King Herod Antipas unwittingly built Tiberias directly over a Jewish cemetery. Luckily, some 130 years later, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai decided to purify the place (Aviva and Shmuel Bar-Am, Times of Israel).

Here's an old post on the Tiberias excavation and here's another that involves that cemetery in Tiberias (see the update). And, of course, there is much more on Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai and other legends about him here and links.