Gallery Hosts Exhibit on Jerusalem’s Ancient Burial Caves

The Finegood Art Gallery on the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus is the latest stop on the tour of “Akeldama: In the Shadow of God’s Mountain,” a traveling exhibition about newly discovered ancient burial caves in Jerusalem.

The exhibit, which began last year as a tribute to the 3,000th birthday of the Holy City, features displays of ossuaries, stone boxes that held human remains, as well as jewelry, oil lamps and bottles found in the tombs in 1989.

The artifacts are spread out in the airy, well-lighted gallery, a far cry from the dark, tight caves in which they were found.

“This way is more optimistic, I think,” said the exhibition’s curator, archeologist Hava Katz. “It doesn’t look so gloomy.”

The pieces, she said, are only a portion of what was found in the caves. They illuminate aspects of Jewish culture at the end of the Second Temple period, the 200 years between the the first century BC and AD 100.

The exhibit, brought to the San Fernando Valley by the Jewish Federation Valley Alliance, the Finegood Art Council and the Israel Antiquities Authority, was funded primarily through donations.

“We’re really trying to elevate the levels of exhibitions they can bring out here,” said Bonnie Somers, spokeswoman for the Valley Alliance. “It’s an effort to bring something of significant cultural value here.”

Although much of the exhibit consists of the ossuaries set upon their traveling crates and folding display boards with pictures and diagrams of the burial caves, the Finegood exhibit will be unique.

Kent Tobey, who installed the exhibit for the gallery, created a slightly larger-than-scale burial cave against a side wall--a replica of the real one shown in a photograph across the room, down to the ossuary it contained.

The exhibit, which is free, is open Sunday through April 13 at the campus, 22622 Vanowen St.

For more information, call (818) 587-3218.