For decades, little did the principal of a kindergarten in Lithuania’s capital realise that his office stood on top of a sacred part of Vilnius’ 17th century Jewish temple, once famous across Europe. An international team of archaeologists on Thursday announced the discovery of the most revered part of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, Lithuania’s major Jewish shrine before it was destroyed by Nazi and Soviet regimes. “We’ve found the bimah, the central prayer platform which was in Tuscan Baroque style. It was one of the central features of the synagogue,” Jon Seligman from Israel’s Antiquities Authority told AFP. “It is really a very exciting development. When we talk about the presentation of the site to the public in the future, this will be one of the central features of the display,” he added. The green and brown, brick and mortar bimah — a raised platform from which the Jewish holy book, the Torah, is read — was unearthed just beneath th

A huge stone that fell from Jerusalem’s Western Wall, barely missing a worshipper, was removed Wednesday as experts took the incident as a sign from above to examine the ancient structure’s stability. Two millennia after thousands of labourers had set it in place, the fallen stone was hoisted up by an unassuming crane operator named Yossi. Roughly a metre high and wide and weighing approximately 400 kilogrammes (880 pounds), the stone fell onto a prayer platform on Monday and just missed a woman. On Wednesday, the crane gently laid the stone down on two planks of wood at a nearby zoned-off clearing. Three smaller rocks that had broken off from the stone when it dislodged were also moved. Neither professionals from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) nor rabbis from the Western Wall administration could remember such an occurrence. It took place at a less-visited part of the wall, where men and women are permitted to pray together contrary to Orthod

The Titanic champions pledged their support at the event which formally launched a $20m campaign by Royal Museums Greenwich, National Museums Northern Ireland, Titanic Belfast and Titanic Foundation Limited for the 5,500 artefacts, which were recovered from the seabed by salvors, over the course of seven deep sea expeditions between 1987 and 2004. The National Geographic Society and National Geographic Explorers-at-Large, Dr. Robert Ballard, the famed oceanographer who discovered the RMS Titanic wreck, and James Cameron, film-maker and deep sea explorer, are backing an innovative collaboration between four organisations to purchase the entirety of the Titanic Artefacts Collection and bring them home to the UK and Ireland. At Titanic Belfast, on the exact location where RMS Titanic was designed, built and launched, National Geographic Society Interim President and CEO Michael L. Ulica announced the Society’s support via a pledge o

When an American art dealer dropped $15,000 on what he thought was “junk” in a New Jersey storage locker, he never imagined it could be the deal of a lifetime. But he now believes stashed in the unit were six paintings by Dutch-American abstract master Willem de Kooning, which could be worth millions of dollars. The auction record for a de Kooning is $66.3 million, set for large canvas “Untitled XXV” at Christie’s in 2016, while another sold privately for a reported $300 million in 2015. Another piece of luck, according to New York gallery owner David Killen, is a painting by Swiss modernist Paul Klee that he says was also found in the unit. The works originally came from the studio of Orrin Riley, a superstar in the art restoration business who died in 1986, leaving everything to his partner, Susanne Schnitzer, who was killed in a traffic accident in 2009. Her executors — friends in New Jersey — spent years trying to find rightful owners for the art, but no one came forward to claim