Meet Yuri Foreman: A Champion Boxer And......A Rabbi?

By Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports

From: http://sports.yahoo.com/

NEW YORK – Yuri Foreman climbs down the steps of the subway to await his train for the short trek from his apartment in Brooklyn to Gleason’s Gym to train. He’s greeted at the bottom of the steps by a billboard with a huge visage of himself, smiling, that is designed to promote his fight for the World Boxing Association super welterweight title on Saturday at Yankee Stadium against Miguel Cotto.

Yuri Foreman, WBA Super Welterweight champion, hits a speed bag in preparation for Saturday's fight.
(Bebeto Matthews/AP)

[Photos: Boxing at Yankee Stadium]

Foreman won the championship by stopping Daniel Santos in November in Las Vegas and will defend it for the first time on Saturday in his adopted hometown as part of the first card at the new stadium.

Nary a soul recognizes him. Foreman anonymously slips onto the train and makes the quick ride to Gleason’s where, amid the cacophony of a bustling gym, he quietly goes about his preparations for his first title defense.

The dichotomy in his life is stark, a world champion professional boxer and an Orthodox Jewish man studying to be a rabbi.

His bicycle is his normal mode of transportation to a fight, an homage of sorts to his simple needs and humble upbringing.

Foreman, 29, is living a life beyond his wildest dreams, despite the fact that there’s no bling hanging from him and his entourage usually just consists of his wife, Leyla.

He was born in Belarus in the former Soviet Union into a poor Jewish family. The family struggled to survive and were often treated like outcasts because of their faith.

Foreman was often harangued by bullies and began taking boxing lessons when he was seven at his mother’s urging in order to defend himself after he was beaten up at a swimming class.

When the family moved to Israel when Foreman was 10, the situation didn’t change much for the better. His father still had to scrimp for work and the family still wasn’t accepted into the community.

In the Soviet Union, the Russians regarded the Foremans as Jews, he explained. In Israel, the Jews regarded them as Russians.

That, though, was the least of Yuri’s concerns. He had become fascinated with boxing and wanted to continue, but couldn’t find a gym or anybody to spar.

He wound up training and sparring at a gym near Haifa with a group of Arab boys, who were all too eager to beat up the Jewish interloper.

“They weren’t really too welcoming,” Foreman said, deadpan. “You kind of had to work on your welcome yourself. You fight, you defend yourself through boxing and after that, you see that people respect you.”

Foreman became good enough that he won three national championships in Israel, but that meant about as much as being the best ice skater in Hawaii. By the time he was 18, he knew he wanted to be a professional boxer and he dreamed of becoming a world champion, but he knew it would be impossible to achieve had he stayed in Israel.

His mother, who urged his first boxing coach to make a man of her son, died and the family continued to struggle financially.

So as a 19 year old, Foreman opted to fly to New York to pursue his dream. He had no connections, little money, few possessions. He left Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel with little more than the clothes on his back and his dream of becoming a champion. The odds weren’t particularly in his favor, but it turned out the relocation to New York was the key move in a rags to riches story that perhaps tops all others in boxing, a sport built on such stories.

“There’s never been anyone with a story like this kid,” promoter Bob Arum said of Foreman.

Foreman quickly assimilated athletically. He won the New York Golden Gloves championship and showed the talent that made him an Israeli champion.

But he had no money and had to work doing manual labor in New York’s garment district, hauling around huge racks of clothes for very low wages in order to survive.

[Photos: Latest images of Yuri Foreman]

His luck soon began to change, though, even as the odds seemed to be stacked against him. He turned professional and had modest success. Training at Gleason’s one day, he spotted a striking blonde woman who interested him.

He approached her, and though she rebuffed his initial advances, she was interested, too. The woman, a Hungarian model and part-time amateur boxer, Leyla Leidecker, would eventually become his wife. She would encourage him in his boxing and push him to understand his spiritual side.

Leidecker searched the Internet for Kabbalah and found a service at a synagogue near their home in Brooklyn. Foreman and Leidecker attended a service by Rabbi DovBer Pinson, who spoke of the similarities between boxing and life.

In 2007, as Foreman was 21-0 and beginning to be noticed by the major boxing sanctioning bodies, he decided to undertake rabbinical studies under Pinson at Yeshiva Iyyun.

It was an incredibly challenging step that hasn’t always been simple. But Foreman’s studies help him to keep his sport in perspective.

And though his style – he’s a boxer who moves and is far better defensively than he is offensively – held him back, the irony of what happened in the last several months is not lost upon him.

When Arum was considering putting Foreman on the undercard of the Manny Pacquiao-Cotto fight on Nov. 14 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, there was much resistance from those who felt he didn’t deserve the spot.

Arum liked what he saw of Foreman and decided to give him the coveted primary undercard spot on the Pacquiao-Cotto card despite the media outcry.

“I always knew he was a good fighter and I wasn’t listening to the big experts who were saying ‘He’s so boring,’ ” Arum said. “We had one guy, one prominent boxing writer, who took it upon himself to call the networks and tell them that if they put (Foreman) on, he would blast them. It was crazy. He went out of his way to hurt the kid.

“I knew the kid was talented and if I could bring that out, get him a championship, a big victory, that I would have in him a tremendously unique story.”

And now he does. Foreman, who only headlined one minor card in the past, suddenly finds himself as the main event in his hometown in one of the biggest cards of the year.

Because of his religious beliefs, he can’t fight until after the Sabbath, which ends at 9:13 p.m. ET on Saturday. So Foreman will pray until 9:13, then leave his hotel and be taken by a police escort to Yankee Stadium while a helicopter with an HBO camera aboard televises the action.

“The change in my life has been incredible,” Foreman said. “To be here, to see my face on the scoreboard (at Yankee Stadium), it’s amazing. I was a young man with a dream. I believed in myself. I believed I could become a world champion. But what has happened to my life has been incredible. I’m very thankful, but it’s crazy. Who would have ever thought this would have happened to me?”

View from the Lab: Who is a Jew? DNA can hold the key

Steve Jones examines the complex issues of identity

By Steve Jones
From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

An ultra-Orthodox Jew is silhouetted against a floodlit fountain as he performs the Tashlich ceremony - casting away of sin - at the shores of a lake Photo: GETTY

Who is a Jew? As the recent passport row shows, that question can be murky, with elements of belief, values, descent and nationality mixed in.

It also has dark reminders of a terrible time in history when Jewish blood meant death; and science, or pseudo-science, claimed to be able to sniff it out.

Things have changed. A decade ago, I was passing through Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv carrying a box filled with small tubes. Alerted by the Syrian stamp in my passport, the security staff gave me a hard time. After emptying my case, she asked what was in the box. I replied, irritably: "Arab spit". "What?" she said. "I'm a geneticist, I explained, I have been sampling Palestinian DNA. At once, her face brightened – ah, DNA. Had I heard the then novel stuff on the shared male chromosomes of priestly Jewish families such as the Cohens? I had, and we parted on amicable terms.

The conversation gave me pause for thought. Joseph Mengele himself wrote his doctoral thesis on the relationship between jaw shape and racial identity. His ideas were pernicious rubbish and even 20 years later the thought of a genetic test for Jewish descent would have been treated with horror. Now, one has emerged and is not despised but hailed by many Jews themselves.

A scan of half a million variable sites across the genomes of several hundred Europeans and Americans, each aware from their family history of having had a recent Jewish or a non-Jewish ancestry, gave an absolute separation between Jews and others: even a single Jewish grandparent was enough to provide an unambiguous identity, written in DNA. A carefully chosen sample of just 300 of those sites does almost as well, and a test based on that would be cheap.

Judaism is inherited down the female line – as are mitochondria. Their DNA shows that today's Jews from the largest group, the eight million Ashkenazim – most of whom once found their home in central and eastern Europe, and who now represent the majority of American Jews – have few grandmothers. Around half descend from just four women who bear mitochondrial types found almost exclusively in that population. Two million trace their descent from just one of those ancient predecessors.

In 1650, there were only 100,000 Ashkenazim in Europe, a number then further reduced by pogroms. In 18th-century central Europe, though, came massive expansion of that population, largely because of their relatively good living conditions. In Frankfurt, Jewish life expectancy was at aged 48, compared to 37 among non-Jews. By 1800, Jews numbered two million and by 1900 almost four times as many.

Much of the growth occurred in the Rhine Valley – modern-day Germany. The increase was concentrated among a few well-off families, many of whom had 10 children while the poorest classes had far fewer. As a result, the majority of today's Ashkenazim derive from a small proportion of that population, two million from one mother, quite literally their shared Eve, who probably lived – unknown and unrecognised – in an affluent household in a German or Polish village three centuries ago. A shared close identity through mothers, grandmothers, and more is, for millions of Ashkenazim, a genetical fact.

For others, though, the story is murkier. A separate great centre of Jewish tradition and culture grew up in Spain. Most of the Sephardim arrived after the peninsula fell under Roman control in the second century BC. In 711 AD, a Muslim army invaded. The Jews flourished under a tolerant regime, often as lawyers, merchants and the like. Then the Church returned. After a century of persecution, they were expelled in 1492. The Sephardim were scattered over much of Europe, the Middle East, and the New World.

Their mitochondria, unlike those of the Ashkenazim, give no sign of a recent bottleneck. Their DNA show instead how porous the boundaries of faith may be. Threatened by the Inquisition, thousands of Spanish Jews left to places such as Turkey. Others converted, or pretended to do so – and one Portuguese village maintained a secret Jewish culture, marrying among themselves for five centuries.

Y chromosomes reveal much leakage across the religious divide. A fifth of all the male lineages of modern Spain are of Jewish origin, which means that millions of devout Spanish Catholics have Sephardic ancestry, while the Sephardim themselves, with their unique and ancient Jewish ritual, present a wider range of genetic variation than do their Ashkenazi cousins. Plenty of those with one faith have biological roots in the other. My wife, as it happens, comes from a Sephardic family and has relatives with surnames such as Cardozo and Pexiota. After 40 years here, she has still not got round to obtaining a British passport. In spite of the double helix, identity remains a confusing thing.

Auschwitz death camp sign stolen

It is the first time the sign has been stolen in the camp's history

The infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the entrance to the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland has been stolen, officials there say.

The sign was taken from above the gate overnight. Police are looking for the culprits.

It is the first time the sign, made by prisoners, has been stolen since it was erected in the early 1940s.

More than a million people - 90% of them Jews - were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz during World War II.

"It's a terrible thing," Auschwitz official Pawel Sawicki told the BBC.

"It had to be planned - it's obvious it wasn't someone who just came along to do it," he said.

The missing sign, which is occasionally removed by officials for conservation work, has been replaced by a replica.

During the Holocaust, hundreds and thousands of prisoners passed under the sign, whose words mean "Work Sets You Free", but the vast majority were murdered or worked to death.

The 27 Craziest Menorahs

by: Michael Jordan
from: http://www.urlesque.com/

Hanukkah! Chanukah! Hanuka! Guys, it's Chanuqa! To celebrate, I've compiled a list of the 27 most EXTREME™-ly awesome menorahs.

To be sure, Urlesque has love for all holiday iconography, whether it be the Christmas Tree, the Diwali lantern, or the Kwanzaa cake (not really...shudder), but there's something special about the way the menorah has harnessed the power of the internet.

These here intertubes have spat out some pretty bizarre, hilarious, and just plain geeky menorahs over the years. Check out all 27 after the break.

1. Star Wars Menorah
The prequels would have been better if they had just been nine hours of this. (via Freaking News)

2. Moped Menorah
Vroom vroom. Ciao. Latte. Pizza pie. Huh?! (via Shiny Shiny)

3. Bowling Pin Menorah
This guy is such a player. Rock on with your bowling pin menorah, smooth stuff. (Templar1307 Flickr via Walyou)

4. iPhone Menorah
Nothing says "dutiful religious observer" like a 3.5 inch LCD touchscreen. (via The Dallas Morning News/Technology)

5. Shoe Menorah
Surprisingly, this is not actually the worst thing that 'Sex and the City' has wrought. (via Listicles)

6. LED Menorah
I can't front: this is straight up awesome. (via Evil Mad Scientist)

7. Wine Cork Menorah
Genius. Holiday with the family can be pretty stressful and a cup of vino or thirteen really takes the edge off. Why not work that into the iconography? (via Stupid.com)

8. Surf Board Menorah
Brah. Tubular. Jack Johnson. Puka shell necklace. Yes? Yes! (via Listicles)

9. Matchstick Menorah
Can anyone think of a pun using that Nicholas Cage movie 'Matchstick Men'? Me neither. Seems like a waste. (via Uncommon Goods)

10. Cat Menorah
Awww, a kitty cat. You guys like those I'm pretty sure. (via Cracked)

11. Minimalist Menorah
Oh man, I dig this one. Clean lines. Simple. Portable. Cost efficient (the holidays, to me, are all about cost efficiency). (via Reddish Studio)

12. Dog Toy Menorah
I can't decide if this is more or less sacrilegious than the Star Wars menorah. (Snooty Paws via Listicles)

13. Barbie Menorah
So many questions about this one. Who made it? Why? Was it a really religious child or a really weeeird adult? (via Bang It Out)

14. Flame Menorah
All right guys, I'm not sure how many more of these I can take. A menorah made out of flames? Fine. Why not? (via Yes But No But Yes)

15. Jeep Menorah
Nothing says Hanukkah like the ultimate symbol of gross materialism. (via Judaism.com)

16. Hello Kitty Menorah
Me: "hello, kitty cats!!!" (did you see what I did there?!) (via Miss Music Nerd)

17. Crocheted Menorah
This seems like a bit of a fire hazard, but to each their own. (Rchach's Flickr via Walyou)

18. Mel Gibson Menorah
HAHAHA. Irony! You hipsters will eat this one up. (via NPR)

19. Lady Liberty Menorah
Patriotism + Hanukkah = Something? (Eclipse Pics Flickr via Yes But No But Yes)

20. Marijuana Menorah
How dare this company steal the idea that my roommates and I had freshman year?!!! (via Cannabista)

21. Star Trek Menorah
Definitely worse than the Star Wars menorah...because it is for real. (Oskay's Flickr via Buzzfeed)

22. Pez Menorah
Nothing says Hanukkah like Charlie Brown, Spider Man and Fred Flintstone. (via Lifehacker)

23. Swarovski Crystal Menorah
Jeez Daniel Swarovski, maybe you should tone it down a little? Not everything needs to be coated in your crystals. (via If It's Hip, It's Here)

24. Moose Menorah
(exasperated) Please everyone, there is no need for this! (via Yes But No But Yes)

25. Lego Menorah
Okay, I give up. Rock on with your Lego selves. (Jcresnick's Flickr via Walyou)

26. William Shatner Menorah
NO! This has gone too far!! You can't keep doing this to me. (via Yes But No But Yes)

27. Diet Coke Can Menorah
I give up. I am a broken man. Just do whatever...make a menorah out of diet coke cans if you want. (via Listicles)

12 Things You Didn't Know About Judaism

posted by Brad Hirschfield

Now that Rosh Hashanah, one of the best known Jewish holidays, has arrived we have a chance to start again, to discover new things about ourselves, each other and even about ancient traditions like Judaism. While there's a lot to learn (just think of Jews who've studied the Torah over the centuries), every journey starts somewhere. With that in mind, here are 12 things most people don't know about Judaism. From sacred time to sacred sex, you may be surprised by what you learn.

1. Judaism isn't about being Jewish; it's a spiritual-ethical technology for being a good person. From the very beginning, the Bible tells the story of the first humans, Adam and Eve, who were not Jewish - they were simply two people trying to make a good life in the world as they found it. That's what Judaism is all about.

2. You don't need to be Jewish to get into Heaven. For those people concerned about the after-life, even the most ancient and traditional understandings of Judaism embrace the notion that all those who live ethical lives, no matter what tradition they follow, will be "close to God" in the world to come.

3. Being part of the Chosen People is not about being better than anyone else. While the Bible and most of subsequent Jewish tradition view the Jews as chosen, they make no claims about Jews being inherently better than other people. Judaism teaches that Jews have a mission, which is to draw close to God and be a blessing to the entire human race - to be a light to the nations.

4. Once a Jew, always a Jew. Who's a Jew? Well, if you have a Jewish parent, that may be your answer. From the time of Abraham until the time of Jesus (about 1,500 years), having a Jewish father made someone a Jew. For the next 1,900 years after that, having a Jewish mother made someone Jewish. That rule changed, for many Jews, about 20 years ago. Now depending on denomination, it's the mother if one is Orthodox or Conservative, or either parent if one is Reform or Reconstructionist. The other way to become a Jew is through conversion. Either way, once a Jew, always a Jew. You never stop being Jewish and nobody can take your Jewishness from you, no matter how you do Jewish.

5. Conversion to Judaism is more a leap of belonging than a leap of faith. Joining the Jewish people is just that, committing one's self to sharing the destiny of a community. Not all converts, let alone all born-Jews, agree about they believe or how they should practice, but they all share that feeling of connection to a shared destiny as Jews.

6. There is no "Jewish Pope", no single spiritual authority for Jews. All Jews are spiritually equal. While communities may elect chief rabbis, that is what they are -- the elected officials over the community which empowers them. Judaism has accepted and even celebrated degrees of diversity unknown in other monotheistic traditions, and still does.

7. Kabala is not a different religion. Kabala, Hebrew for that which is received, is the mystical thread of Judaism, dating back thousands of years. Like all mystical traditions, it privileges personal experience and is therefore attractive to a wide range of people. While far more complex than special water, or red thread bracelets, it does embrace the power of ritual to directly transform one's life.

8. Kosher does not mean "blessed by a rabbi". Like people of many faiths, Jews traditionally recite a blessing before eating, acknowledging the sacred source of all things, and the sacredness of acts such as eating. But that's not what makes food kosher. Kosher means fit for use, according to Jewish tradition. In the case of food, it means eating according to a biblically-rooted code which asks that people eat with reverence for all life, and nurture the awareness that there is a connection between what we put in our mouths and how we act in the world.

9. The hole in the sheet for sex is a myth. While there is a range of attitudes towards human sexuality in Judaism, no community advocates that people make love through a hole in a bed sheet. In fact, Judaism overwhelmingly embraces sex not only for procreation, but for pleasure. It even teaches that the optimum time for making love is on the Sabbath, and imagines that the holiness of the day and of great sex are a good match for each other.

10. The idea that Jews have horns is based on a simple misreading of a Biblical verse. While this misconception has often been used by anti-Semites to link Jews to devils, its origins and use by artists like Michelangelo in his famous sculpture of Moses are far less hostile. It grows out of a poor translation of Exodus 34:30, which describes Moses as having an aura of light. The Hebrew word for the aura can be misunderstood as having horns.

11. Chanukah both is, and is not, the Jewish Christmas. Chanukah is far more than a holiday seeking gift-giving parity with the day celebrating Jesus' birth. It recalls an ancient fight for religious freedom and celebrates the deep spiritual light that can be found even when we least expect it. Like Christmas, Chanukah comes at the coldest and darkest time of the year, seeking to remind us that the light can be found in the most unexpected places - for Jews, in a small flask of oil which burned longer than anyone expected and for Christians, in the form of a little baby in a Bethlehem manger.

12. Rosh Hashanah is not the beginning of the Jewish year, not exactly anyway. While the Jewish ritual calendar does begin anew on Rosh Hashanah, what the day really celebrates is the birthday of the world. It's not about things starting again for the Jews, but about the fact that we all get to start again, be Adam and Eve again. Rosh Hashanah celebrates that renewal is possible and that second chances are real.

Judaism is a living tradition. It began more than 3,000 years ago and remains a work in progress. What one fact about Judaism, or whatever faith interests you, would you share with others? That sharing helps keeps a tradition alive. Give it a shot!

Woman Shouts "Heil Hitler!" At Jewish Man Praising Israel's National Health System (VIDEO)

Dear God. This is the way America is now. Some conservative radio host stages a "town hall" meeting in Las Vegas. The local news reports that it "was a packed house, full of opinions and no shortage of passion." How passionate? How does some dumb lady, yelling anti-Semitic slurs at another man grab you?

Media Monitor Jon, who holds it down daily on YouTube at NewsPoliticsNews, has the completely depressing clip, which shows an Israeli man holding forth on the virtues of Israel's health care system, which is "universal and compulsory, and is administered by a small number of organizations with funding from the government." I have no basis to judge its merits -- in 2000, the World Health Organization ranked it as the 28th best in the world. That said, let me sum up the countering argument, proferred by another town hall attendee: "Heil Hitler!"

That's right! Some idiot woman yells "Heil Hitler" at a Jewish man who was doing nothing more than being a passionate advocate for Israeli health care. The man, quite naturally, goes completely apoplectic, saying "Shame on you" over and over again. The woman counters by saying, "Well, you ought to be the most against President Obama." The poor man responds by saying, "I want to talk, not against Obama or for Obama. I want to talk about [health care]." He goes on to describe his own experiences with high-cost health care. For his efforts, the woman mocks him some more!

As ThinkProgress points out today, "Conservatives have strenuously denied that there is any anti-Semitism on display by anti-health reform protesters at town hall meetings nationwide." Those denials are no longer tenable, are they?

UPDATE: Various sources maintain that this awful woman is wearing an Israeli Defense Forces t-shirt, which is precisely the level of coherence we've come to expect from these Town Hall twits.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

8 Jewish archaeological discoveries

From Dead Sea Scroll fragments to a ‘miracle pool’

MSNBC.com

AP By John Roach, contributor Introduction It’s been more than 60 years since the first pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the caves of the Judean desert, but yet another piece of parchment bearing 2,000-year-old scriptures — verses from the Book of Leviticus — was found just in the past few years. Such finds demonstrate that the Holy Land can still produce ancient treasures, thousands of years after the events described in the Bible. Click the "Next" arrow above to learn about seven more archaeological discoveries in recent years that have shed light on Jewish history and the Old Testament. Bernat Armangue / AP Ceramic shard may bear oldest Hebrew inscription A 6-by-6-inch pottery shard unearthed at the archaeological dig site of Hirbet Qeiyafa (the Elah Fortress) in Israel, shown here, contains five lines of faded characters that may bear the oldest Hebrew inscription ever found. The 3,000-year-old text dates to the time of the Hebrew Bible's King David and is thought to be written in proto-Canaanite, a precursor to the Hebrew alphabet. While other people used proto-Canaanite characters as well, the inscription contains a three-letter verb meaning "to do" that existed only in Hebrew, according to Yossi Garfinkel, a Hebrew University archaeologist in charge of the dig. "That leads us to believe that this is Hebrew, and that this is the oldest Hebrew inscription that has been found," he told the Associated Press. Other scholars, however, have urged caution until more is known about the inscription and its context. AP Elusive biblical wall discovered? The Book of Nehemiah describes the construction of a wall as part of a rebuilding project after Jerusalem’s destruction by the Babylonians. Archaeologists think they have now found the wall. Their case rests on the pottery pieces and other artifacts shown here. They were discovered near a wall that was previously thought to date to the Hasmonean period of Jewish history (142-37 B.C.). These pottery pieces date to the 5th century B.C., which suggests that the wall is older and corresponds with the time of the biblical account. Other archaeologists, however, are unconvinced. Kevin Frayer / AP Remains of ‘miracle pool’ discovered In this image, water flows through a site where the remains of a pool serve as a link between Jewish rituals and a famous miracle said to have been performed by Jesus. The site, known as Siloam Pool, was used by Jews for ritual immersions before heading down to the Temple Mount. Jesus is said to have miraculously cured a man of blindness in the pool. Archaeologists have also found biblical-era coins with Jewish writing, pottery shards and a stone bottle cork — all helping confirm the authenticity of the site, located in what is now the Arab neighborhood of Silwan. Tara Todras-whitehill / AP Dead Sea Scrolls shrouded in mystery The ancient texts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls are considered one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century, yet to this day they remain shrouded in mystery and controversy. The 2,000-year-old collection of writings, which includes the earliest surviving pieces of the Bible such as the Book of Isaiah, shown here, was discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin shepherd in a cave above the ancient settlement of Qumran. Conventional interpretations hold that the texts were authored and stored by the Essenes, a hard-core Jewish sect thought to have occupied Qumran at the time. However, in recent years this view has come under attack by scholars who believe Qumran was a fortress or pottery-making facility that had nothing to do with Essenes. These scholars contend that the cave was just a convenient storage locker of sorts for Jews fleeing the Roman siege on Jerusalem in the year 70. Bernat Armangue / AP Evidence of King Herod's tomb mounts Archaeologists excavating King Herod's winter palace in the Judean desert continue to unearth what appear to be the remains of the ancient ruler's tomb. The sarcophagus shown here was pieced together from scattered fragments of a mausoleum archaeologists believe was smashed apart by Jewish rebels who reviled the king as a Roman puppet. Herod was the Jewish proxy ruler of the Holy Land under Roman imperial occupation from 37 to 4 B.C. After his death, scholars believe the palace became a stronghold for rebels fighting the Roman occupation. The rebels were defeated, and the palace destroyed, in the year 71. Emilio Morenatti / AP Tunnels, chambers aided escape from Romans When the Romans sacked Jerusalem around the year 70, Jews took refuge in a network of underground tunnels and chambers, archaeological finds have revealed. This image depicts one of the tunnels dug beneath the main road of Jerusalem during what is known as the Second Temple era. Pottery shards and coins from the end of the era attest to the channel's age, according to one of the project’s researchers. Elsewhere in the city, archaeologists have uncovered chambers filled in with supplies, an indication that the ancient Jews prepared for the uprising. Rachael Strecher / AP Archaeologists question Masada saga The mountaintop fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea is famous in Jewish history as the final holdout for about 900 rebels who chose suicide over capture by the Romans in A.D. 73. The story plays a central role in Israel's national mythology, though recent studies have cast doubt on its credibility. Some scholars think the mass suicide was greatly exaggerated or never happened at all. In the 1960s, archaeologists found two male skeletons and the braided hair of a woman in a bathhouse — and the Israeli government gave those remains a state burial in 1969, thinking that they came from Masada’s Jews. More recently, however, some archaeologists have suggested that the remains were actually those of the Jews’ Roman enemies. Despite the recent controversies, the Masada fortress, seen here, remains one of Israel's top attractions. A cable car carries visitors to the top of the rock.

Updated: 3:44 p.m. ET Dec. 10, 2008

© 2008 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28162671/