4,000 years later, the Dead Sea is facing another disaster

Photos: Moshe Bernstein

After four years as a manager of Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul branch of the Osher Ad supermarket chain, Moshe Bernstein decided to switch directions and professionally pursue his favorite hobby of video editing. Right before the course started though, he decided to use a last free day to take his camera and travel to the Dead Sea, never fathoming the magnitude of the project he was about to undertake.

That impromptu trip to the lowest place on Earth quickly became a hobby he couldn’t stop. Bernstein began to travel along the Dead Sea at least twice a week, walking along its rocky shores, clambering down the cliffs, hiking on crumbling ground and skipping over sinkholes, documenting the magic on his camera, and returning home when the sun set.

“People didn’t know what had come over me,” he says, “and actually, neither did I. It was like I was possessed — the Dead Sea simply captivated me.”

What makes a person decide to leave his job and daily routine to set out and track the Dead Sea on foot, along dozens of kilometers including dangerous swamps and up to 6,000 sinkholes? Bernstein can’t really answer that question, but half a year later, he completed one of the most breathtaking trails in Eretz Yisrael.

“Each week I did a different segment. In all, I walked about 55 kilometers, the length of the main northern basin. At some of the shores, I skipped over streams and wells, but I spent most of the route on dry land, photographing continuously.”

He subsequently publicized his photos and video clips, but only when people reached out to him from all over the world to ask him permission to publish the pictures did he realize the value of the treasure he had created.

Still, he doesn’t take his adventure as a blanket recommendation to hike around the Dead Sea. “There are dangerous sinkholes everywhere,” he says, “and no one should get close to them without a professional escort.”

Pillars of Salt

It was over 3,700 years ago that the Biblical cities of Sedom and Amorah, Admah and Tzeva’im, and the entire plain — the Arei Hakikar — found their epic destruction as a result of human wickedness and Divine retribution.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and this huge saline basin, in the running several years back as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, is on the verge of another collapse, although tourists are not yet about to turn into a pillar of salt. It’s the convergence of thousands of sinkholes, breathtaking in their beauty but wreaking havoc with the stability of the region.

Everyone knows that the Dead Sea’s therapeutic waters are so full of salt that bathers float right to the top, and the healing power of its minerals is unmatched.

But today the Dead Sea is dying again, and its banks are collapsing. The water level is dropping close to four feet every year, and the main part of the sea, the northern basin, has lost about a third of its surface area since the 1970s. Over the decades, Israel, Jordan and Syria have diverted the freshwater sources that feed the Dead Sea, for drinking water and irrigation. Plus, Jordanian companies and the Israeli Dead Sea Works factories evaporate Dead Sea water to harvest its rich minerals for industry and export.

In fact, the southern part of the sea at Ein Bokek, Israel’s Dead Sea hotel and tourist strip, is actually a massive man-made evaporation pool making up the lake’s southern basin (even though the water and the minerals are essentially the same).