The Jerusalem Biblical Zoo has a newborn lion cub to greet visitors strolling through its black iron gates. It’s a 10-week-old Asiatic lion cub who arrived on the first of October, and it is “super cute,” said Benjamin Fainsod, the zoo’s head of carnivores and orangutans. A lioness named Yasha gave birth to twins in a bush in the lions’ enclosure. One cub was accidentally struck by Yasha and died of its injuries on Wednesday.
Asiatic lions hunted the land around Jerusalem during Biblical times. Lions, the official symbol of the City of Jerusalem, are mentioned more than 150 times in the Bible.
The zoo’s very first lion cub arrived in 1943. That year, the zoo's founder, a Hebrew University zoology and etymology professor Aharon Shulov, arranged for a friend helping the British Brigade in North Africa to ship him an orphan cub for Shulov’s little zoo on Jerusalem’s Shmuel Hanavi Street. It was the first lion in the Holy Land several hundred years after disappearing during the Crusades.