General Shlomo Goren, Chaplain of the Israeli Defense Forces, Western Wall
“I am speaking to you from the plaza of the Western Wall, the remnant of our Holy Temple. ‘Comfort my people, comfort them, says the Lord your God.’ This is the day we have hoped for, let us rejoice and be glad in His salvation. The vision of all generations is being realized before our eyes: The city of God, the site of the Temple, the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, the symbol of the nation’s redemption, have been redeemed today by you, heroes of the Israel Defense Forces. By doing so you have fulfilled the oath of generations, ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning.’ Indeed, we have not forgotten you, Jerusalem, our holy city, our glory. In the name of the entire Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora, I hereby recite with supreme joy, Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has kept us in life, who has preserved us, and enabled us to reach this day. This year in Jerusalem – rebuilt! “
Transcript of Recording, IDF Radio, June 7, 1967
Colonel Motta Gur [on loudspeaker]: All company commanders, we're sitting right now on the ridge and we're seeing the Old City. Shortly we're going to go in to the Old City of Jerusalem, that all generations have dreamed about. We will be the first to enter the Old City. Eitan's tanks will advance on the left and will enter the Lion's Gate. The final rendezvous will be on the open square above.
[The open square of the Temple Mount.]
[ Sound of applause by the soldiers.]
Yossi Ronen: We are now walking on one of the main streets of Jerusalem towards the Old City. The head of the force is about to enter the Old City.
[Gunfire.]
Yossi Ronen: There is still shooting from all directions; we're advancing towards the entrance of the Old City.
[Sound of gunfire and soldiers' footsteps.]
[Yelling of commands to soldiers.]
[More soldiers' footsteps.]
The soldiers are keeping a distance of approximately 5 meters between them. It's still dangerous to walk around here; there is still sniper shooting here and there.
[Gunfire.]
We're all told to stop; we're advancing towards the mountainside; on our left is the Mount of Olives; we're now in the Old City opposite the Russian church. I'm right now lowering my head; we're running next to the mountainside. We can see the stone walls. They're still shooting at us. The Israeli tanks are at the entrance to the Old City, and ahead we go, through the Lion's Gate. I'm with the first unit to break through into the Old City. There is a Jordanian bus next to me, totally burnt; it is very hot here. We're about to enter the Old City itself. We're standing below the Lion's Gate, the Gate is about to come crashing down, probably because of the previous shelling. Soldiers are taking cover next to the palm trees; I'm also staying close to one of the trees. We're getting further and further into the City.
[Gunfire.]
Colonel Motta Gur announces on the army wireless: The Temple Mount is in our hands! I repeat, the Temple Mount is in our hands!
All forces, stop firing! This is the David Operations Room. All forces, stop firing! I repeat, all forces, stop firing! Over.
Commander eight-nine here, is this Motta (Gur) talking? Over.
[Inaudible response on the army wireless by Motta Gur.]
Uzi Narkiss: Motta, there isn't anyone like you. You're next to the Mosque of Omar.
Yossi Ronen: I'm driving fast through the Lion's Gate all the way inside the Old City.
Command on the army wireless: Search the area, make sure to enter every single house, but do not touch anything. Especially in holy places.
[Lt.- Col. Uzi Eilam blows the Shofar. Soldiers are singing 'Jerusalem of Gold'.]
Uzi Narkiss: Tell me, where is the Western Wall? How do we get there?
Yossi Ronen: I'm walking right now down the steps towards the Western Wall. I'm not a religious man, I never have been, but this is the Western Wall and I'm touching the stones of the Western Wall.
Soldiers: [reciting the 'Shehechianu' blessing]: Baruch ata Hashem, elokeinu melech haolam, she-hechianu ve-kiemanu ve-hegianu la-zman ha-zeh. [Translation: Blessed art Thou Lord God King of the Universe who has sustained us and kept us and has brought us to this day]
Rabbi Shlomo Goren: Baruch ata Hashem, menachem tsion u-voneh Yerushalayim. [Translation: Blessed are thou, who comforts Zion and builds Jerusalem]
Soldiers: Amen!
[Soldiers sing 'Hatikva' next to the Western Wall.]
Rabbi Goren: We're now going to recite the prayer for the fallen soldiers of this war against all of the enemies of Israel:
[Soldiers weeping]
Kel male rahamim, shohen ba-meromim. Hamtse menuha nahona al kanfei hashina, be-maalot kedoshim, giborim ve-tehorim, kezohar harakiya meirim u-mazhirim. Ve-nishmot halalei tsava hagana le-yisrael, she-naflu be-maaraha zot, neged oievei yisrael, ve-shnaflu al kedushat Hashem ha-am ve-ha'arets, ve-shichrur Beit Hamikdash, Har Habayit, Hakotel ha-ma'aravi veyerushalayim ir ha-elokim. Be-gan eden tehe menuhatam. Lahen ba'al ha-rahamim, yastirem beseter knafav le-olamim. Ve-yitsror be-tsror ha-hayim et nishmatam adoshem hu nahlatam, ve-yanuhu be-shalom al mishkavam [soldiers weeping loud]ve-ya'amdu le-goralam le-kets ha-yamim ve-nomar amen!
[Soldiers are weeping. Rabbi Goren sounds the shofar. Sound of gunfire in the background.]
Rabbi Goren: Le-shana HA-ZOT be-Yerushalayim ha-b'nuya, be-yerushalayim ha-atika! [Translation: This year in a rebuilt Jerusalem! In the Jerusalem of old!]
Rav Goren, 1967
The prime minister should declare that the holy places of the Jews be placed under rabbinic supervision. All the Temple Mount is holy to the Jews and therefore it is in the jurisdiction of the Chief Rabbinate even though mosques were built there. Since it is forbidden for Jews and non-Jews alike to enter the Temple Mount the Chief Rabbinate should request the army to close the Temple Mount for everybody. This step should be taken immediately [Goren's emphasis] before the military curfew is lifted and before free access is given. Now the Arabs are in a state of shock, and their only hope is to stay alive and not be massacred. Now is the moment to set the conditions and basis for the status quo proposed. Through such a step, the exclusive Muslim rule on the Mount will be circumvented. Later it will not be possible to do anything. If this proposal comes from the rabbinate rather than the government it will be seen as a religious matter of holiness rather than a political idea. And since entry will be forbidden for Jews, the Arabs cannot claim discrimination.
RABBIS WANT SYNAGOGUE BUILT ON TEMPLE MOUNT
JERUSALEM, Aug. 5— In a step that defied both civil and religious law in Israel, a group of prominent rabbis issued a formal call today for the construction of a synagogue on the Temple Mount, an area sacred to Moslems and forbidden to Jews.
They also called for public prayers on the site.
The rabbis buttressed their call today with a 1967 survey map purporting to show the exact location of the original First and Second Temples as well as the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant. They said that by careful measurements, they had identified the exact area of the Temple Mount where it would be permissible under Jewish religious law to build a synogogue.
The rabbis' statement - which took the form of a religious edict called a halacha - was the latest expression of increasingly militant Jewish religious fervor here, and it prompted warnings by civil authorities that the plan could provoke Jewish-Moslem clashes.
The Temple Mount includes the Dome of the Rock, also called the Mosque of Omar, the third most sacred site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina, It was built in the seventh century. Later, Al Aksa Mosque was also built on the Temple Mount.
The whole area is under the control of Moslem religious authorities.
There is no worship by Jews on the Temple Mount because, under Jewish law, it is forbidden to enter the areas that were covered by the original temples. Since no one knows precisely where the temples stood, all of the Temple Mount is proscribed. The rabbis assert that the map will show exactly what is off limits and what is not.
The call for prayers and the construction of a synagogue came at a meeting led by Rabbi Shlomo Goren, a former Chief Rabbi of the Ashkenazim. He was rabbi of the Israeli Army when it seized the Wailing Wall in 1967. The Wailing Wall is the western wall of the Temple Mount, an ancient man-made plateau that formed the base, or mount, upon which Solomon's Temple and Herod's Temple were built.
Previous attempts by Jews to pray on the Temple Mount - including demonstrations last February led by Guela Cohen, a member of a hard-line faction in Parliament - have led to clashes with both Arabs and the police. A Fear of Violence
Jerusalem's Mayor, Teddy Kollek, and other officials say they fear that efforts by Jews to pray on the mount will lead to violence, since anything seen as a threat to the Dome of the Rock would be highly provocative to Moslems.
Given the religious tensions in Jerusalem, the civil authorities have been happy with the religious laws banning Jewish worship on Temple Mount. Shortly after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and conquest of East Jerusalem, Israel turned over responsibility for the area to an Islamic charity.
''The calm in Jerusalem is a direct result of the 1967 unity government decision not to alter the status of the rights of the various religious groups,'' Mayor Kollek said when told of the rabbis' meeting. ''I only hope that the Prime Minister and the Chief Rabbinate won't change their minds on that.''
In their statement today, the rabbis called on ''the Jewish nation and the Israeli authorities to guard and implement Jewish sovereignty of the Temple Mount and prevent its being turned over to and desecrated by foreigners.''
The head of the Supreme Moslem Council in the city, Sheik Saad al-Din al-Alami, said that ''the Moslems will never permit any Jew to pray on Haram al-Sharif or any council to establish a synagogue in the area.'' Haram al-Sharif is the Arab name for the Temple Mount.
''The Moslems are prepared to die for this,'' the Sheik added.
The Dome of the Rock stands over the site from which, Moslems believe, Mohammed ascended into Heaven.
Other manifestations of growing Jewish religious militancy in Israel came as recently as Monday night, when Parliament enacted a law forbidding the public display of unleavened bread - including rolls, pita, cakes and cookies - in shops and restaurants during the weeklong Passover holiday. In Jerusalem, ''the religious,'' as they are known, have been setting fire to bus-stop shelters bearing swimming suit advertisements and on Saturdays, the Jewish sabbath, barricades are set up in Orthodox neighborhoods to keep outsiders away.
At the meeting today, about 80 rabbis and religious activists listened as Rabbi Goren explained his map, which he said he had asked Israeli Army engineers to prepare in 1967. By careful measurements, he asserted, he could approximate the area of the old temples and thus discover the areas atop the mount where Jews could worship.
''The only place that has absolutely no shadow of a doubt is in the south,'' Rabbi Goren said. ''There is room for a synagogue that could hold a thousand people.''
''Maybe two thousand,'' put in another rabbi.
''We must establish a place, a permanent place of prayer on the mount,'' Rabbi Goren told the group. ''It is a desecration of God to enter the Mount under the authority of an Arab guard. To enter without saying any holy words because Jews are afraid.''
In its call for the building of a synagogue, the religious order issued by the meeting today also raised the possibility of building a Third Temple in the immediate future, rather than waiting - as some Orthodox groups hold - for the coming of the Messiah.
Unfurling his map, which was dated June 21, 1967, Rabbi Goren explained his calculations, adding of the map, ''I have never shown it to anyone.'' What Herod Did
''It has to be a square of 500 cubits, this goes back to Moses, back to Abraham,'' he said in an interview, pulling out and putting away a tiny pocket calculator and squinting at a worn, much-folded piece of paper covered with numbers. ''From east to west it's equal, but from north to south it's doubled. Herod must have extended it on both sides.''
A cubit, Rabbi Goren estimates, is about 58 and a half centimeters.
''The Holy of Holies would be here by these steps, from the rock where the altar was, 70 to 80 meters, maybe more than that, 85,'' he said. ''We know it's the altar, because wine was poured onto the rock into a hole and down into a cave, where every 70 years, the young priests would clean out the residue and burn it. The sources tell us the cave was just the size of a very young boy and when I was there in '67 I tested it.''
Asked about the location of the possible Third Temple, he looked down at his map, which indicated it would be positioned in the same space as the Dome of the Rock mosque.
''It's a big problem,'' he said.
In the Holy of Holies
By Nadav Shragai
This photograph, which is being published for the first time, shows Rabbi Shlomo Goren on June 7, 1967 in the Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, holding a shofar and a Torah scroll. The photo is stirring great excitement among the Temple Mount movements; it could generate an earthquake regarding the view presented in halakha (Jewish religious law) concerning the entry of Jews to the Mount.
Goren, who was at the time the chief army chaplain, was known as the most prominent opponent of the rabbinic-halakhic consensus of the time, holding that Jews must be forbidden to visit the Temple Mount. Immediately after the Six-Day War, he sent members of the Chaplaincy Corps to carry out measurements on the Temple Mount, and he stipulated areas in which Jews must not set foot, for fear of treading on the place where the Temple and the Holy of Holies stood - places which Goren, too, said were off-limits to Jews in our time. Goren described the area as "Herodian additions" (the construction that King Herod added to the site of the original Temple) and allowed Jews to visit it, contrary to the position taken by the Chief Rabbinate Council and most of the religious-Zionist and Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) sages.
Now, on the basis of this photograph, it turns out, ostensibly, that under the "law of the conquest of areas of the Land of Israel" (which makes it mandatory to conquer areas that are held by gentiles), Goren allowed himself - in the course of the war - to enter the heart of hearts of the Dome of the Rock. This is the very place which, according to Goren himself, and according to many others as well, is the place where the Holy of Holies stood.
In the opinion of some of the Temple Mount movements and their rabbis, the "law of conquest" continues to apply today as well, in light of the Palestinians' de facto control of the Temple Mount. Therefore, it is obligatory to conquer it and thereby realize Jewish sovereignty and ownership of the Temple Mount. This photograph ostensibly supplies such movements with proof that the "law of conquest" makes it permissible to enter the most sacred area of the Temple Mount today.
The photograph is from the forthcoming "Collected Writings of Shabtai Ben Dov." Ben Dov, a member of the pre-state Lehi underground organization, who died 27 years ago, wrote much about the kingdom of Israel, the Temple and the image of the future redemption. Yehuda Etzion, a member of the Jewish underground organization in the 1980s, sees Ben Dov as his mentor and is publishing his writings. Etzion found the photograph in the Israel Defense Forces Archives, in a film that was never released for publication.
Excerpts from Rav Goren's Sefer on Har Habayit
-
Currently, when Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount is in danger, Mount Moriah is liable to become the subject of negotiation between us and the Arabs, and unfortunately, there are politicians who are willing to negotiate our sovereignty over the Temple Mount, relying on the alleged prohibition of the Chief Rabbinate to enter Har Habayit. This prohibition is liable to be used as an excuse to hand over the nation's Kodesh ha’Kodashim (inner sanctum) to the Muslims. Therefore, I decided to publish the book now, from which it will be proven that there are large areas of the Temple Mount which all Jews are permitted to enter, according to all halakhic opinions, after immersion in a mikveh..."(p.15).
-
I could not escape the feeling that from a historic perspective, assigning the Western Wall plaza for Jewish prayer was nothing but the result of the expulsion of the Jews from the Temple Mount by the Crusaders and Muslims together. Thus, an intolerable situation was created in which even after our liberation of the Temple Mount, the Muslims remained on top of Har Habayit, and we were down below; they were inside, and we were outside.
-
The prayers at the Western Wall are a symbol of destruction and exile, and not of liberation and redemption, because Jewish prayers at the Western Wall began only in the sixteenth century – before that, Jews prayed for centuries on the Temple Mount... only about three hundred years ago, the Jews began praying at the Western Wall. And this is the proof: in every reference in the Midrash where it is mentioned that the shechina (Divine Presence) has not moved from the Western Wall, and learns this from the verse in Shir Hashirim (Song of Songs): ‘Behold! There he stands behind our wall’ – this refers to the western wall of the azara, or the wall of the heichal, in other words, the wall of the Kodesh HaKodashim, and not the wall of the Har Habayit, which we call the Western Wall pg 26)
- This shameful situation, where under Israeli rule a Jew does not have the right to pray on the mountain of God, cannot be tolerated under any circumstances. The debate over where it is permitted according to Jewish law to go on the Temple Mount, or where it is forbidden, has nothing to do with the government ... These sacred places are not the private property of the Muslim Waqf, whose members have always been a source of bitterness and poison for the Jews, with their incitement from within the mosques on the Temple Mount to slaughter the Jews... had they closed the Temple Mount to Jews and non-Jews alike, I would have kept quiet, but to allow the Arabs to do there as they please while Jews are forbidden to even open up a Book of Psalms and pour out their hearts before the Creator of the world – this is a religious, historical, and legal scandal – nothing short of blasphemy! "(pg. 41).
(א) הַמֶּלֶךְ הַמָּשִׁיחַ עָתִיד לַעֲמֹד וּלְהַחְזִיר מַלכוּת דָּוִד לְיָשְׁנָהּ לַמֶּמְשָׁלָה הָרִאשׁוֹנָה. וּבוֹנֶה הַמִּקְדָּשׁ וּמְקַבֵּץ נִדְחֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל. וְחוֹזְרִין כָּל הַמִּשְׁפָּטִים בְּיָמָיו כְּשֶׁהָיוּ מִקֹּדֶם. מַקְרִיבִין קָרְבָּנוֹת. וְעוֹשִׂין שְׁמִטִּין וְיוֹבְלוֹת כְּכָל מִצְוָתָן הָאֲמוּרָה בַּתּוֹרָה.
(1) The King the Messiah (lit. the annointed) will stand up and return the Kingdom of the house of David to its old [glory], to the first rule, and build the Temple (lit. holy), and gather the scattered ones of the Israel, and return all of the laws in his days as they were before; bringing sacrifices, and making shmitahs (leaving the land fallow in the seventh year) and jubilees like all of the commandments that it says in the Torah.
(א) שָׁלֹשׁ מִצְוֹת נִצְטַוּוּ יִשְׂרָאֵל בִּשְׁעַת כְּנִיסָתָן לָאָרֶץ. לְמַנּוֹת לָהֶם מֶלֶךְ שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (דברים יז טו) "שׂוֹם תָּשִׂים עָלֶיךָ מֶלֶךְ". וּלְהַכְרִית זַרְעוֹ שֶׁל עֲמָלֵק שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (דברים כה יט) "תִּמְחֶה אֶת זֵכֶר עֲמָלֵק". וְלִבְנוֹת בֵּית הַבְּחִירָה שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (דברים יב ה) "לְשִׁכְנוֹ תִדְרְשׁוּ וּבָאתָ שָּׁמָּה":
(1) Three mitzvot were commanded to Israel at the hour of their entry into the land: to appoint for themselves a king, as it is said, "You shall surely appoint a king over you (Deuteronomy 17:15);" to wipe out the descendants of Amalek, as it is said, "Erase the memory of Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:19):" and to build the chosen house [Temple], as it is said, "Seek His Presence and go there (Deuteronomy 12:5)."
