Yom Yerushalayim - June 2008

June 2nd marks Yom Yerushalayim, the anniversary of the liberation and reunification of Jerusalem in 1967. It marks the first time in thousands of years that the entire city of Jerusalem, the holiest city in Judaism, was under Jewish sovereignty. The destruction of Jerusalem was a watershed event in Jewish history that began thousands of years of mourning for Jerusalem; so, it follows, that the reunification of Jerusalem should be a joyous celebration that begins the process of reversing thousands of years of destruction and exile. (http://tinyurl.com/2mowqa)

You can hear the historic and dramatic sounds of Israeli Defense Forces entering the Old City of Jerusalem and reclaiming the Western Wall on June 7, 1967, including the sound of Army Chief Chaplain and Brigadier General Shlomo Goren sounding the shofar, soldiers saying prayers, including the shehechianu, singing HaTikvah and crying. A transcript is also available. Visit http://tinyurl.com/23a4ej.

Between 1948 and 1967, the Jordanians who had captured old Jerusalem refused to allow Jews to enter, and systematically destroyed Jewish monuments. In 1967, Egypt provoked another pan-Arab war against Israel (the Six-Day War) by ordering U.N. peacekeepers out of the Sinai Peninsula and blockading the Straits of Tiran. When Israeli soldiers recaptured Old Jerusalem a few days later, they discovered that Jordanians had not only dynamited synagogues; they had torn up Jewish tombstones and paved roads and built latrines with them. (http://tinyurl.com/3x6lqs)

Yet, soon after the victory of 1967, Israel unilaterally awarded control of the Temple Mount to the Islamic Authority of Jerusalem — the Waqf. In 1996 the Waqf changed the accepted status quo that was kept for generations and converted two ancient underground Second Temple Period structures into a new large mosque. Both structures, known as Solomon’s stables and the Eastern Hulda Gate passageway, were never mosques before. The new mosque extends over an area of 1.5 acres, thus being the largest mosque in Israel, able to accommodate 10,000 people. In November 1999, the Waqf opened what it called an “emergency exit” to the new mosque. The exit expanded into a gaping hole, 18,000 square feet in size, and up to 36 feet deep. Thousands of tons of the ancient fills from the site, subsequently found by Israeli archeologists to contain artifacts dating as early as the First Temple Period, were dumped into the Kidron Valley. Since the creation of the gaping hole and up until now, without any archaeological supervision, thousands of square-meters of the ancient surface level of the Temple Mount are dug up by tractors, paved and announced as open mosques. You can learn more about the archaeological destruction of the Temple Mount at www.har-habayt.org.