Tiberias - Current, Other transliterations, Twin Cities

32°48N 35°32E, pop (2000e) 44 000. Holiday resort town in Northern district, N Israel, on W shore of L Tiberias; named after the Roman emperor, Tiberius; medicinal hot springs known since ancient times; one of the four holy cities of the Jews; Jewish settlement re-established in 1922; Monastery of St Peter.

Tiberias
Ruins of ancient Tiberias, 1862.
Hebrew	טבריה
Arabic	طبرية
Government	City
Standard Hebrew	Tverya
District	North
Population	39 900 (CBS end of a)
Jurisdiction	10 000 dunams (10 km²)

Coordinates: 32°47′23″N, 35°31′29″E

Tiberias (Hebrew: טבריה, Tverya;

Tiberias was built at about AD 20 by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great on the site of the destroyed village of Rakkat, and it became the capital of his realm in Galilee.

Tiberias's name in the Roman Empire (and consequently the form most used in English) was its Greek form, Τιβεριάς (Tiberiás, Modern Greek Τιβεριάδα Tiveriáda), an adaptation of the taw-suffixed Semitic form that preserved its feminine grammatical gender.

In the 18th and 19th centuries Tiberias received an influx of rabbis who established the city as a center for Jewish learning.

Current

Today, Tiberias is Israel's most popular holiday resort in the northern half of the country.

In October 2004 (Tishrei 5765), a controversial group of rabbis claiming to represent varied communities in Israel undertook a ceremony in Tiberias , claiming to have established a new Sanhedrin.

Professor Yitzhar Hirschfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is leading long-term archaeological excavation at Tiberias, in which many volunteers participate.

Other transliterations

Standard Hebrew: Təverya Tiberian Hebrew: Ṭəḇeryāh

Twin Cities

Tiberias is twinned with:

Montpellier, France, since 1983 Worms, Germany, since 1986 St Paul, Minnesota, United States, since 1996 Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States Village of Great Neck, New York, United States