Secret of the Caves    

For 700 years, no Jew had entered the sacred caverns beneath Mearas Hamachpeilah. From a daring 13-year-old’s secret descent in 1968 to Noam Arnon’s midnight mission years later, generations risked everything to uncover what lies beneath the resting place of the Avos and Imahos

Chevron.

Chol Hamoed Succos, 1968.

Close to midnight.

The city is under curfew.

Just that afternoon, a terrorist had thrown a grenade at Jewish worshippers in the city, injuring 40.

A car pulls up outside Mearas Hamachpeilah, and a man and a girl wrapped in blankets emerge.

The man is Yehuda Arbel, head of the Shin Bet’s Jerusalem portfolio. And the girl is his 13-year-old daughter, Michal.

They’re there on a mission: to sneak inside the ancient stone building we associate with Mearas Hamachpeilah and explore what lies beneath its surface.

Eyewitness Accounts

From when the Mamluks conquered Eretz Yisrael in 1279, until Israel won the territory in the Six Day War in 1967, only Muslims were allowed to enter that tall Herodian-era building believed to be covering Mearas Hamachpeilah. Jews were restricted to praying up to the seventh step outside the entrance to the building’s eastern side. Even now, the Waqf control 81 percent of the building, and while Jews have access to the presumed tombs of Avraham and Sarah and Yaakov and Leah, they’re only allowed into Yitzchak and Rivka’s burial place ten days a year.

If access to the site has been banned for non-Muslims for close to 700 years, how do we know what lies underneath the ancient structure?