M A S A D A מצדה צילום מהאוויר ומסיור רגלי HD 11-14.4.2014

Masada (Hebrew for fortress) is a place of gaunt and majestic beauty that has become one of the Jewish people's greatest
symbols as the place where the last Jewish stronghold against Roman invasion stood. Next to Jerusalem, it is the most popular destination of tourists visiting Israel.



More than two thousand years have passed since the fall of the Masada fortress yet the regional climate and its remoteness have helped to preserve the remains of its extraordinary story
According to Flavius, Herod the Great built the fortress of Masada between 37 and 31 BCE. Herod, an Idumean, had been made King of Judea by his Roman overlords and "furnished this fortress as a refuge for himself." It included a casemate wall around the plateau, storehouses, large cisterns ingeniously filled with rainwater, barracks, palaces and an armory.

Some 75 years after Herod's death, at the beginning of the Revolt of the Jews against the Romans in 66 CE, a group of Jewish rebels overcame the Roman garrison of Masada. After the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple (70 CE) they were joined by zealots and their families who had fled from Jerusalem. There, they held out for three years, raiding and harassing the Romans.

Then, in 73 CE, Roman governor Flavius Silva marched against Masada with the Tenth Legion, auxiliary units and thousands of Jewish prisoners-of-war. The Romans established camps at the base of Masada, laid siege to it and built a circumvallation wall. They then constructed a rampart of thousands of tons of stones and beaten earth against the western approaches of the fortress and, in the spring of 74 CE, moved a battering ram up the ramp and breached the wall of the fortress.

Once it became apparent that the Tenth Legion's battering rams and catapults would succeed in breaching Masada's walls, Elazar ben Yair - the Zealots' leader - decided that all the Jewish defenders should commit suicide; the alternative facing the fortress's defenders were hardly more attractive than death.

Flavius dramatically recounts the story told him by two surviving women. The defenders -- almost one thousand men, women and children -- led by ben Yair, burnt down the fortress and killed each other. The Zealots cast lots to choose 10 men to kill the remainder. They then chose among themselves the one man who would kill the survivors. That last Jew then killed himself.

Elazar's final speech clearly was a masterful oration:
"Since we long ago resolved never to be servants to the Romans, nor to any other than to God Himself, Who alone is the true and just Lord of mankind, the time is now come that obliges us to make that resolution true in practice ...We were the very first that revolted, and we are the last to fight against them; and I cannot but esteem it as a favor that God has granted us, that it is still in our power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom."

The story of Masada survived in the writings of Josephus but not many Jews read his works and for well over fifteen hundred years it was a more or less forgotten episode in Jewish history. Then, in the 1920's, Hebrew writer Isaac Lamdan wrote "Masada," a poetic history of the anguished Jewish fight against a world full of enemies. According to Professor David Roskies, Lamdan's poem, "later inspired the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto."

The heroic story of Masada and its dramatic end attracted many explorers to the Judean desert in attempts to locate the remains of the fortress. The site was identified in 1842, but intensive excavations took place only in the mid-1960's with the help of hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers from Israel and from many foreign countries.

To many, Masada symbolizes the determination of the Jewish people to be free in its own land.

ההר שהפך סמל לנחישות ולמלחמת גבורה
על צוק המבודד בלב מדבר, צוק המשקיף ממרומים על ים המלח ועל נופי הפרא של מדבר יהודה, שכן בעבר ארמון מפואר. בימי המרד הגדול התבצרו בו אחרוני המורדים ברומים, והפכו את מלחמתם הנואשת סמל למאבק לחירות. אירועי העבר המרתקים שהתרחשו על ההר והממצאים הארכאולוגיים שבו השפיעו על הכרזת הגן הלאומי מצדה אתר מורשת עולמית של אונסקו.
המקור ההיסטורי החשוב ביותר לתולדות מצדה הוא כתבי יוסף בן מתתיהו, היסטוריון, סופר ומצביא יהודי, שחי בימי המרד הגדול ברומים.

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