Kibbutzniks Are Fighting to Preserve a 2,000-Year-Old Ritual Bath

Over the past century, Israeli archaeologists have discovered several ritual baths, or mikva’ot, from the Second Temple period and the subsequent centuries—important testimony to the antiquity and continuity of Jewish ritual. When one such ancient mikveh was recently discovered in the Lower Galilee near Kibbutz Hannaton, archaeologists expected to document it and then allow it to be covered up by the highway now under construction. But some of the locals objected, as Rossella Tercatin writes: