Once a 25-tonne ritual bath has left the ground, nobody can undo the lift. Eyal Kaho, who oversaw the operation for the Israel Antiquities Authority, put the risk in one line: if the structure falls apart, the mikveh is lost. In the end it did not, and the intact 2,000-year-old bath, about four metres wide, was carried out of a building site in Kiryat Gat on a heavy transport truck.
The IAA’s conservators needed two weeks of preparation before a crane with a 300-tonne capacity took the load.
Digging a frame under a structure that cannot be touched
The bath belongs to the Carmei Gat neighbourhood, where construction work led the IAA to excavate a Second Temple-period settlement. The Times of Israel report dates the lift to July 2026 and describes how the Conservation Administration spent about two weeks exposing the bath by digging around it, then drilling beneath it to thread steel beams through. Because the mikveh was left in place until the frame was ready, the dig around it had to leave the structure standing undisturbed on all sides. The beams became a supporting frame, so the whole block could be lifted as one unit instead of being cut into pieces and reassembled elsewhere.
Israel National News adds that four conservators carried out that exposure and drilling by hand, and names Kaho as the senior conservator who led the move. Israel Today quotes him more fully: once such a structure is lifted there is no going back, and if it falls apart the mikveh is lost. The real difficulty, the report says, lay in the removal rather than the discovery.
Plaster, foam and a 300-tonne crane
An ancient mikveh is a plastered cistern, and its plaster is the fragile part. Before the lift, conservators covered it with gauze and adhesive and then lined and reinforced the structure with protective foam, HeritageDaily reports, a measure meant to absorb the vibration of lifting and of the road. A crane with a 300-tonne capacity, many times the weight of the bath, then raised it clear of the ground and set it onto a wide-load vehicle.
Capacity is not the same as the load. A 300-tonne rating on a crane means the hook is not working near its limit with a 25-tonne bath, which is the sensible margin when the object cannot be set down and re-rigged. Kaho’s point about the lack of a way back applies to every stage: there is no second attempt if the plaster cracks or a beam shifts, so the preparation took longer than the lift itself.
The trip itself was short, roughly 20 minutes, but the width of the load meant closed roads and escort vehicles on the way to the Israel Antiquities Authority‘s National Treasures Department in Beit Guvrin, where the mikveh is held in temporary storage.
Why a mikveh is worth this effort comes down to what it is. A mikveh is a pool for ritual immersion, and its presence in a settlement is among the clearest archaeological signs that the residents kept Jewish purity law. Most settlements of the period leave only pottery and coins; a purpose-built, plastered bath says something about daily practice that those objects cannot. Cutting it into blocks would have destroyed the plaster surfaces that show how the pool was built and used, which is the argument for moving the structure whole.
A Jewish settlement nobody knew was there
The excavation directors, Elena Kogan-Zahavi, Maayan Margulis and Shira Lifshitz, say the Jewish settlement found here is the first and only one known in this area, in the transition zone between the Judean Lowlands and the northern Negev. Stone measuring vessels recovered from the site support that reading: Jewish law held that stone vessels could not become ritually impure, which made them common in households of the Second Temple period. The settlement appears to have been abandoned around the time of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.
Money explains why the work happened in this form. The Times of Israel puts the excavation at NIS 28 million, roughly $9.4 million, funded by the Israel Land Authority, which is clearing the land for housing. Lifting the bath, instead of recording it and letting the builders proceed, was a choice to keep the object as part of the neighbourhood: once construction finishes, the mikveh is due to return to Carmei Gat and stand in a public space, giving residents a view of the area’s earlier Jewish population. Keeping the bath in the neighbourhood, and not only in a museum, ties it to the only known Jewish settlement from that period in the area.
The IAA has not said how long the mikveh will wait in Beit Guvrin or when the neighbourhood will be ready to receive it, and the plaster that survived the lift will have to survive a second move.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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