Quarries in Israel

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A quest for quarries today, for ABC Wednesday.

First, let's see two ancient masonry stone quarries in Jerusalem.
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The photo above was taken underground during the Jerusalem Light Festival, hence the eerie blue color.
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This is the huge quarry beneath the Old City from which Herod the Great took the "Herodian stones" needed to renovate the Temple and its retaining walls, including the Western Wall.
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We call it Zedekiah's Cave, but, as a fascinating article in The New York Times says,

"For the Freemasons, the cave is definitely Solomon's quarry, making it one of the most revered, perhaps the most revered, site of their international secret society. The organization considers King Solomon the first Freemason, and its tradition of doctrines, passwords and symbols derives from the building of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. In the absence of the Temple, Freemasons revere the quarry, and they hold an elaborate ceremony inside the cave once a year. "

This thousands of years old quarry was found when I worked at a salvage dig of a Canaanite cemetery.

Today the area is covered by the awful Holyland Park residences.

Moving on to modern quarries, here's one in the Givat Shaul neighborhood.

It looks like the cement mixers fill up on site and drive out to their construction site.

Today the apartments and yeshivas have come right up against the old quarries.

The area used to be Dir Yassin . . . .

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Further north, toward Haifa, this quarry is biting into Mount Carmel.

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The Jerusalem Post reported in 2008 that our Minister of National Infrastructures "warned that there would be shortages in raw materials by 2020. There are currently 80 working quarries in Israel, and about a thousand which have been tapped out and are in need of rehabilitation. However no new quarry has been approved by the national planning council in the last 14 years."
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But my favorite quarry photo is this memory of the great five days I lived in the village of Darajat, studying Arabic.

(For more about it, see under my label Darajat.)

Our Bedouin hosts took our small group up the mountain for a hike and to see the quarry in the Negev desert where they work.

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Hope you don't have dust in your eyes after looking at all these quarries. Shalom!

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