**Special Notice: Your humble servant will be in transit from May 17-24 and will update this blog as possible. Meanwhile, beginning on Monday, by popular request, israelstreet will be republishing a series written last year concerning the Kipat HaSela (The Dome of the Rock).
TODAY’S BLOG
6:00 pm Israel time, Sunday, May 24
Part 13:
So let’s go back to where we stopped yesterday. We had just passed the years 1948 to 1967 during which time the Jordanians and Palestinians ethnically cleansed the Old City of Jerusalem of every Jew while blowing up Jewish houses of worship.
No Jews had gone to the Temple Mount for almost a generation.
The date is June 6, 1967. It is the second day of the Six Day War. Israeli paratroopers under the command of Col. Mordechai Gur had fought their way to the Temple Mount. In one of the most stirring moments from that War, Gur relayed to all of Israel the glorious news that “The Temple Mount is in our hands again!”
Joyous soldiers at the Kipat HaSela (see below for translation).
Gur ordered a few of his soldiers to climb up the Dome and unfurl an Israeli flag on top.
For four hours, that flag flew proudly over the Foundation Stone, over the site of the First and Second Temples, over the holiest place in Judaism.
And then, Moshe Dayan inexplicably ordered it taken down.
Inexplicably because it Dayan also uttered these words at that moment: “This compound was our Temple Mount. Here stood our Temple during ancient time, and it would be inconceivable for Jews not to be able freely to visit this holy place now that Jerusalem is under our rule.”
But the most moving descriptions of that day came from IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren:
“When we arrived on the Temple Mount, I blew the shofar, fell on the ground and prostrated myself in the direction of the Holy of Holies, as was customary in the days when the Temple still stood. … [Later] I found General Moti Gur sitting in front of the Omar Mosque. He asked me if I wanted to enter, and I answered him that today I had issued a ruling permitting all soldiers to enter because soldiers are obligated to do so on the day when they conquer the Temple Mount in order to clear it of enemy soldiers and to make certain that no booby traps were left behind. … I took along a Torah scroll and a shofar and we entered the building. I think that this was the first time since the destruction of the Temple almost two thousand years ago that a Torah scroll had been brought into the holy site which is where the Temple was located. Inside I read Psalm 49, blew the shofar, and encircled the Foundation Stone with a Torah in my hand. Then we exited.”
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In this extremely rare photograph, we see IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren with his shofar and Torah inside the Dome of “the Rock.”
A few weeks later Rabbi Goren created a synagogue on the Mount, only to have Dayan intervene and remove it.
In the final months of 1967, the Israeli government decreed that Jews and Christians could visit the Mount with no impediments–but added, absurdly, that they could not pray there.
And so the situation remained until September 0f 2000. In fact, in 1985, your humble servant entered the Dome of “the Rock” with no problem whatsoever. The feeling of being at the Foundation Stone, where the Ark of the Covenant had been placed, and where the Holy of Holies was located was one sheer exhilaration.
In September of 2000, the second Palestinian intifada broke out–and the unbelievable result was a return to the situation of 1948-1967; no Jews were allowed on the Mount. What is even more unbelievable is that when the Mount reopened in August of 2003 to non-Muslims, the Islamic Wakf was suddenly given the power to control if and when non-Muslims could visit the Mount.
Today, the Islamic Wakf even has its own police who patrol the Mount and work with the Jerusalem police to squash any semblance of Judaism or Israel on the Mount (no prayers, no Torahs, no flags).
No non-Muslims are permitted inside the Al-Aksa Mosque or the Dome of “the Rock”. And this despite the fact that Israeli law specifically allows freedom of worship at every holy site in Israel.
In short, no Jew can visit the holiest site in Judaism.
In summary, your humble servant hopes that the next time you see a picture of the “Dome of the Rock”, you will see it for what it is: a building built over the holiest place in Judaism–the Foundation Stone.
The next time you see a picture of the structure, remember that for 2,964 years Jews have prayed there (with only a few exceptions).
The next time you see a picture of the structure, remember that Muslims are latecomers to the site–and that even the early Muslims in Jerusalem sanctioned Jewish prayer in the Dome.
And if you insist on looking “at” the building, remember it was designed and built by Christians who modeled it after churches that were in the vicinity at the time.
In fact, you may want to begin to use the correct terminology for the site–in Hebrew and in Judaism, the Dome of the Rock is “Kipat HaSela“–“the protective covering of the Stone”.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.