Ramathnia

Ramathnia (Arabic: ﺍﻟﺭﻣﻨﻨﻴﻪ, "camel pasture") is an abandoned village in the center of the Golan Heights, about 10 kilometers east of Katzrin.

The village was inhabited alternately in different periods, and from the 19th century the members of the Circassian people lived there, until their departure during the Six Day War. At the end of the 19th century, one of the first modern attempts of Jewish settlement in the Golan Heights was made there.

Location

The village is located on a dome that is 831 meters above sea level, and its houses are built of basalt stones. To the south of it is another dome at a height of 826 m, called Tel a-Ramatnia, and is included in the village lands. There are 11 water sources in the area of the village, but two of them were used by the residents of the village: Birkat A-Ramatania at its foot in the east and the Ein A-Ramatania spring to the north of it.

History

In 1885, the "Beit Yehuda Society" association, in which personalities such as Moshe Felixon and Shmuel Shulman were active, purchased 15 thousand dunams of the village's lands, and about 35 Jewish families moved to the village and settled in some of its houses. In the winter of 1885, the settlers sowed the land together with the farmers from the village, but only a small number of men remained in the village to work the land, due to the lack of residential buildings. Sometime later it turned out that the land purchase transaction was illegal, it was canceled before it was completed, and the settlers left the place in 1887.

Some of them were among the founders of the Bnei Yehuda settlement in Bir a-Shakum in the southern Golan. The memory of the Jewish settlers of Ramathania is commemorated today in the name of Mount Bnei Safed in the Bashanit ridge, about 3 km northeast of the village, and of the Bnei Safet Reservoir, about a kilometer east of the village.

Archeology

About half a kilometer southeast of the village, many archaeological remains associated with the Roman and Byzantine periods were discovered. Some of the village houses even survived in their place since the Byzantine period, and one of them was probably used as a church. Among the finds: an inscription with the number 850 in Roman numerals, which according to the Anno Domini refers to the year 538 AD [1]; Greek inscriptions, crosses and animal figures. Apparently, the Byzantine settlement was abandoned with the Muslim conquest of the area in 636, since then the settlement has been inhabited and abandoned alternately mainly by nomadic Bedouin tribes. At some point before the end of the 19th century, the village was inhabited by Circassians.