Ein Kshatot — the site also known as Umm el-Kanatir, the mother of the arches — occupies a green shelf on the western slopes of the Golan, where a powerful spring emerges beside arches of cut basalt. Around the water lie the remains of an ancient Jewish village whose economy depended on the spring, and at its centre the ruins of a synagogue built of the region's dark volcanic stone. What sets the site apart is the restoration campaign carried out there: rather than rebuild with new material, the team surveyed, catalogued and digitally modelled the collapsed blocks, then lifted them back into position with cranes, reconstructing the building from its own fragments. The result is a rare thing in archaeology — a ruin returned to something close to its original volume, without invention. The film follows both dimensions of the site: the landscape, with its springs, pools and grazing land looking out over the Sea of Galilee, and the technical narrative of the reconstruction, which speaks directly to audiences interested in heritage engineering as much as in ancient Judaism.
