The Times of Israel runs a lengthy article on the current state of the Archeological Zone/Jewish Museum in Cologne, Germany. It summarizes the extremely important finds that archeologists have turned up and gives a status report on the project itself, with photographs, diagrams and reconstructions.
Excavations, smack in the middle of city’s Town Hall Square, are currently ongoing, and the public’s interest is enormous. Until recently, the municipality organized free guided tours around the site twice a week. But starting late December, as the excavation work started to wind down and the project moved toward its next stage — the actual construction of the museum — the tours ended. According to the municipality, “many thousands” of visitors have participated in such tours since the excavations started in 2007. Often too many visitors showed up for the tours so that organizers had to send home those who hadn’t signed up in advance.
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In a few years, the remaining ruins of that 700-year-old synagogue and the adjacent ancient mikveh, or ritual bath, will be visible to visitors in what promises to become one of Europe’s most fascinating museums of ancient and medieval Jewish history. Visitors will get see the base of the shul’s original bimah, and a modern reconstruction of it, in addition to many other relics found in Cologne’s medieval Jewish quarter.
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The Archaeological Zone/Jewish Museum, as the Cologne municipality calls the project, will be spread out over an area of more than 10,000 square meters (approximately 110,000 square feet). Besides the ancient shul, visitors will get to see (and learn about) ancient medallions, clay marbles and ivory dice, animal bones (which shed light on the Jews’ eating habits) and a Hebrew inscription above a private house that contained instructions about how the “feces are to be taken out.” Archaeologists also found countless slates with inscriptions, including one museum officials consider “a true historical sensation” — the oldest Yiddish writing on stone.
Watch a 3D digital reconstruction of the ancient Cologne Jewish quarter and medieval synagogue.
The project has had its share of controversy. (In April, for example, Cologne’s mayor removed the longtime director of the project, Sven Schuette, from his post after Schuette was quoted as suggesting that anti-Semitism could be behind some of the criticism. Schuette was to have spoken at the Krakow conference on managing Jewish immovable heritage, but was prevented from coming because of his removal from the project. Max Polonovski from the French Culture Ministry presented Schuette’s detailed power point, however — which can be see in its entirety online.)
In his blog on Jewish art and monuments, Samuel D. Gruber has written extensively about some of the important finds during the Cologne excavations, as well as the controversy.