Yom Rishon
Sunday
9 Av 5781
July 18 2021
Tisha B’Av Today
A mourner at the Kotel early this morning reading the Eicha (Book of Lamentations). Note that he is sitting on the ground with torn clothes. Photo Mendy Kurant.
Click here for a live camera feed from the Kotel (Western Wall).
Today is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar.
Tisha B’Av began at sundown yesterday and continues until sundown today. During these 24 hours, devout Jews do not eat or drink, wash or bathe, use any cream or oil, wear leather shoes, or engage in marital relations.
For those of you who are fasting, OneIsrael wishes you an easy fast.
In chronological order, these are a few of tragedies which happened on the 9th of Av and give us reason to mourn today:
1. The First Temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and the population of the Kingdom of Judah was deported into Babylonian exile.
2. The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE; again, the population of Judea was deported into exile.
3. The city of Beitar was captured and destroyed by the Romans in 135 CE thereby bringing to an end the Bar Kochba Revolt. An estimated 500,000 Jewish civilians and soldiers were slaughtered in Beitar.
4. Jews were expelled from England in 1290. They were expelled from France on the 10th of Av in 1306, and from Spain on the 7th of Av 1492.
4. The Nazi “Final Solution” was approved in 1941 signaling the formal beginning of the Holocaust during which more than one third of all world Jews were murdered.
5. The Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires was bombed in 1994. 85 Jews were murdered and 300 more serious wounded.
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TODAY’S BLOG:
Tisha B’Av Turmoil on the Temple Mount
It was yet another exhilarating Tisha B’Av night with the Women in Green as we marched once again around the Muslim section of the Old City, but that is not the subject of today’s blog.
While we (escorted by cordons of police and Border Guards) were not molested in our walk except for the usual verbal insults, the police on the Temple Mount were attacked by Arab rioters.
The rioters’ strategy was to create a major disturbance in order to stop Jews from ascending the Temple Mount today.
After staging the riot, the Muslims then barricaded themselves inside the Al-Aksa Mosque. In the past, this strategy has been enough for police to stop Jews from going on the Mount at all.
But this morning, it backfired.
Police took the extraordinary step of locking the barricaded Muslims in the mosque, and by mid-morning more than 500 Jews had been on the Mount.
A wonderfully shocking photograph of the front doors of the Al-Aksa Mosque this morning.
This clash between Jews and Arab Muslims was not the only point of conflict in the area.
Orthodox Zionists executed a takeover of the “egalitarian section” at the south end of the Wall. Led by members of the Liba Movement, they even went so far as to erect a partition to separate men and women.
As you can imagine, scuffles broke out, and Reform and Conservative Jews who were there were outraged.
The head of the Liba Movement declared:
“The Western Wall is the center of the struggle between the State of Israel remaining a Jewish state or becoming a ‘state of all its citizens.’ The hundreds of worshipers who came to the southern plaza came are saying clearly that the Reform Movement must not be allowed to impose their identity on the State of Israel. We are sorry that while we are mourning the devastation caused by baseless hatred, the Reform Movement is using violence and not allowing normal services to be held.”
Your humble servant is not going to comment on these words except to repeat what we have always written here at OneIsrael. If Judaism had been left to such elements as Reform Judaism over the centuries, Judaism would have long ago disappeared from the planet.
Thank G-d for the tenacity of the Orthodox.
And so it goes on Tisha B’Av here in Israel.
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.