Nearly 1,000 Jewish men, women and children who had survived the fall of Jerusalem occupied and fortified King Herod’s mountaintop palace complex of Masada neear the Dead Sea. They held out for three years. When the Romans finally broke through, they found that the defenders and their families had chosen to die by their own hands rather than be enslaved. Masada has become a symbol of the Jewish will to be free in its own land.
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