Rosh HaAyin (, ) is a city in the Central District of Israel. It is located in the eastern ravine of the Sharon Plain, opposite the Samaria Mountains. The city is named after its location at the source of the Yarkon River ("Rosh" meaning source/head, "Ayin" meaning spring).
Rosh HaAyin was declared a city in 1994 and covers an area of approximately 16,000 dunams. Its eastern neighborhoods border the Green Line, and the city forms the boundary between the Central District and the occupied West Bank. The city is one of the fastest-growing cities in Israel. In it had a population of .
History
thumb|Rosh Ha'ayin, Yemenite-Jewish immigrants in the [[Ma'abarot|ma'abara]]
thumb|Ras al Ein 1941 1:20,000
Contemporary Rosh HaAyin lies between several sites of historic habitation, with records of occupation dating back hundreds, thousands, or, in one case, hundreds of thousands, of years.
Rosh HaAyin was founded in 1949 near the lands of the Palestinian village of Majdal Yaba, which was captured by Israeli forces in July 1948. The episode formed part of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the Nakba.
The built-up part of Majdal Yaba lay to the south of contemporary Rosh HaAyin, on elevated land that today lies within the Migdal Afek national park. At the centre of the park is the ruin of a mid-19th Century fortified manor house. The ruins contain remnants of a crusader fort, Castle Mirabel, which was an important administrative location for the Crusaders until 1187, when it was taken by Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known as Saladin.
Ras-al Ain means "head of the spring" in Arabic, a reference to the source of the Al-Auja river, which still springs up nearby, and is known in Hebrew as the Yarkon. The same phrase rendered in Turkish, pınar başı, was also used to refer to the location, and when rendered in Hebrew gives Rosh HaAyin, the name of the contemporary town a short distance away. A typical Arabic mispronunciation of the Turkish name, substituting "b" for "p", gave the fortress another of its local names: Binar Bashi. The crusaders knew the site as Surdi Fontes, or "silent springs."
There was an Arab village at Ras al-Ain during the British mandate. According to a study edited by the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, by 1948 it had been "deserted since the 1920s".
Today, the fortress is often referred to as the Antipatros fort, or in Hebrew as Tel Aphek (also transliterated as Tel Afek). However, the physical remains of the fort itself do not date from the Roman city of Antipatris, which was founded on the same site by Herod in the First Century BC, nor from any of the ancient sites known as Tel Aphek.
In The Jewish War, historian Josephus mentions a tower at Aphek, which he implies is near to, but not collocated with, Antipatris. His account concerns the Roman general Cestius:
To the east of contemporary Rosh HaAyin, between the neighbourhood of Neve Afek and the adjacent town of Kfar Qasim, is Qesem cave, an archaeological site containing evidence of human habitation dating back 400,000 years. It has provided some of the earliest evidence of the consistent use of fire by early humans.
Since 1949
Many of the early residents were religious Yemenite Jews airlifted to Israel in 1949 and 1950 in Operation Magic Carpet. They added Biblical words from Exodus 19:4 to the city's logo: "I (God) carried You on eagles' wings." The place was one of the Israel Ma'abarot (transit camps) in the 1950s.
In the 1990s, new neighborhoods were built, although the town still has a large Yemeni-Jewish population.
Archaeology
In 2015, archaeologists discovered a large ancient farmhouse. Among the other artifacts that were exposed in the farmhouse there were two silver coins from the fourth century BCE that bear the goddess Athena and the Owl of Athena. In addition, a monastery dating to the Byzantine period was discovered on one of the hills in the area and included a church, an oil press, residential quarters, and stables equipped with mangers and troughs, etc. In the church were colorful mosaics and also numerous Greek inscriptions.