Entering the Final Stretch

Well the end is near! I can see the finish line. Wednesday was my last day working with the guys at the synagogue at Maoz Hayyim. On Monday I will be giving my final presentation and report at the IAA offices in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, and then Saving the Stones 2014 is finished. After that I have about a week before my plane leaves to return the US.

This week it was my job to do the finishing touches to the face of the wall of the apse that we had done coping on. Finishing involves adding mortar to the cracks and seams on the front of the wall to make it look smooth and neat. Over the course of the week I worked on another section of the wall inside the apse, adding mortar and stones to the cracks to fill in the wall. I am also working on my final report and presentation for STS. I am focusing on the coping and finishing work I did for the apse and southern wall of the synagogue.

Wednesday night a group of families from my synagogue back in Cleveland, Bnai Jeshurun Congregation, came to visit Bet She'an, and I joined them for the evening. We went to Yardena, a Kurdish village near Bet She'an that has been set up to display Kurdish Jewish culture to visitors. We baked special pita, watched a short film about Kurdish culture, saw some traditional dances, and ate a delicious dinner.

Yesterday (Thursday) I went with Ilan (the boss) and Octavian, one of the other workers, to the site of Horvat Omrit near Qiryat Shemonah in the Upper Galilee. A small group of students from Macalester College in Minnesota is conducting excavations there, and we are giving them a short introduction to stone conservation. We are working with them on the stairs of Herod's temple, the third temple he built, after the Temple in Jerusalem and the temple at Caesarea. Thursday we taught them the basics of adding mortar to cracks and seams in the limestone. They are working today on their own, and we will go back on Sunday to finish up the lesson. My job was mostly as the translator, since neither Ilan nor Octavian speaks English very well, and neither of the staff from Macalester speaks Hebrew. In my translations and explanations I was able to test my knowledge of what I've learned over the last five months about stone conservation. Direct translating from Hebrew to English was difficult, but because I know the process and methods I understood what needed to be said. Ilan told me later that I did better than just a normal translator exactly because of this, because this was the work that I was doing and I understood the methods.