Israel Indicts 4 in Artifacts Forgery

Israeli police indicted four antiques dealers and collectors Wednesday on suspicion of running a sophisticated forgery ring that created a trove of fake biblical artifacts, including some hailed as among the most important archeological objects ever uncovered in the region.

The forged items include an ivory pomegranate touted by scholars as the only relic from Solomon’s Temple, an ossuary that reputedly held the bones of Jesus’ brother James, and a stone tablet with inscriptions on how to maintain the Jewish Temple, officials said.

“During the last 20 years, many archeological items were sold, or an attempt was made to sell them, in Israel and in the world, that were not actually antiques,” the indictment reads. “These items, many of them of great scientific, religious, sentimental, political and economic value, were created specifically with intent to defraud.”

The 27-page indictment charges Israeli collector Oded Golan, along with three dealers, Robert Deutsch, Shlomo Cohen and Faiz Amaleh, on 18 counts including forgery, receiving fraudulent goods and damaging antiquities.

Golan called the accusations a campaign of lies spread by Israel’s archeological authorities to destroy the local antiquities trade. “There is not one grain of truth in the fantastic allegations related to me,” he said in a statement.

According to the indictment, the members of the ring took genuine artifacts and added inscriptions to them, falsely increasing their importance and greatly inflating their value. After forging the inscriptions, they painted the items with a coating designed to emulate the patina that would accumulate on the object over thousands of years, the indictment says.

The work was so sophisticated that it fooled leading antiques experts, and some of the artifacts sold for huge sums, authorities said.

The indictment came less than a week after the Israel Museum announced that the ivory pomegranate, one of its most prized possessions, was a forgery. The museum bought the pomegranate from an anonymous collector for $550,000 in the 1980s, with the money deposited into a Swiss bank account.

Among the other objects the police tagged as forgeries were two of Golan’s possessions, the James ossuary and the “Yoash inscription,” a shoebox-sized tablet from about the 9th century BC, inscribed with 15 lines of ancient Hebrew with instructions for maintaining the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

The ossuary, bearing the words “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,” was touted as a major discovery -- the oldest physical link between Jesus and the modern world. But last year, Israeli experts said that although the ossuary, a 2,000-year-old limestone box, was indeed ancient, parts of the inscription had been added recently.