A Day of Incredible Joy In The World’s Holiest City
A few years ago an elderly Ethiopian couple arrived in Israel. They were members of an ancient Jewish community founded in the period of the 1st Temple and claiming descent from the lost tribe of Dan. This community, known as "Beta Israel", had existed in Ethiopia, isolated from the Jewish world for much of their 3000 year history. After years of longing and hardship, this couple was finally able to board an El Al plane to Tel Aviv, to rejoin their children and grandchildren who had been allowed to emigrate to Israel several years earlier.
They had a lifelong dream that they had never expected to be able to fulfill - to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. Nobody had told them that it had been destroyed by The Romans! When their grandson, who told me this story, explained to them what had happened, they were inconsolable. They mourned the Temple's loss as bitterly and deeply as if it had happened that very day. Despite thousands of years of total separation from Jerusalem and the Temple, its place at the heart of their faith had not dimmed.
“If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.” Ps.137
This longing for Jerusalem isn't limited to Ethiopian Jews. Since the year 70ce, the Jewish people have prayed 3 times every day for "the ingathering of the Jewish people in Zion" (Zion is a synonym for Jerusalem). Wherever a Jew is, he or she always faces Jerusalem in prayer, and therefore every synagogue is built facing Jerusalem. Over the centuries, when Jewish pilgrims would arrive and see the Western Wall, the last remaining part of the 2nd Temple that still stands, they would cry out in sorrow. So much so that observers began to call it The Wailing Wall.
But in 1949, amidst the joy of the rebirth of the State of Israel, there was also great sorrow. The Jews were cut off from the Western Wall and the Old City of Jerusalem for the first time since the Romans. Despite surviving its War of Independence against all odds, Israel lost Eastern Jerusalem to Jordan, along with the Judea and Samaria (which was renamed The West Bank by Jordan to sound less Jewish). Jordan ethnically cleansed the Jews from those areas after 3000 unbroken years of Jewish settlement there and banned all Jewish prayer at the Western Wall for the next nearly 20 years.
But in 1967 the situation changed radically: faced with yet another attempt by Jordan and Egypt to destroy the young state, Israel won a miraculous victory in just 6 Days.
Temple Mount is in Our Hands!
During the Six-Day War, on June 7, 1967, IDF paratroopers advanced rapidly through the Old City toward the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. With Jordanian forces in full retreat, the soldiers were able to bring Judaism’s holiest site fully under Jewish control for the first time in 2000 year.
There are incredible and emotional recordings of the scene, as the commander of the brigade, Lt. General Mordechai (Motta) Gur, approaches the Old City he can be heard announcing to his company commanders, “Shortly we’re going to go into the Old City of Jerusalem, as all generations have dreamed about. We will be the first to enter the Old City...” and shortly afterward he announced, “The Temple Mount is in our hands! I repeat, the Temple Mount is in our hands!”.
To Israelis and Jews all over the world, this was a joyous and momentous occasion. Jerusalem was not only reunited but for the first time in 2 millennia, was under Jewish government. That event is celebrated in Israel as “Yom Yerushalayim”, (Jerusalem Day) each year on the anniversary of that date according to the Hebrew calendar, which this year falls on May 22nd.
"Again you will plant vineyards on the hills of Samaria" Jer 31:5
This undimmed passion and attachment to Zion has sustained the Jewish people during the 2000 dark years of exile. Generations came and went without any hope of even visiting, let alone settling there, yet the longing was passed from father to son and mother to daughter.
This intense connection to the Holy Land is clear in the craftsman and woman whose work we strive to support. Many of them choose not to live in the safety of Israel's heartland, cities such as Tel Aviv or Haifa. They live on the geographic periphery, close to the Gaza strip where rocket fire and cowering in bomb shelters are a daily part of life. They live in Judea and Samaria (renamed "The West Bank" by Jordan), where driving to your home can mean rocks thrown at your car and high-security fences around your community.
They live in these places because they want to build their country, every corner of it, through their businesses and hard work. Because every inch of this land is the Zion Jews have prayed for and dreamed of since the year 70ce. They are the inheritors of the mantle of the pioneers of Israel who drained the Hula malaria swamp in the 1950s and created Israel's agricultural industry, founded Tel Aviv in 1909 on a sand-dune, the first new Jewish city since the times of prophets, and reunited Jerusalem in 1967.
Share in The Miracle of Israel
You can be a partner in this fulfillment of ancient dreams and prophecies, by supporting small businesses and artisan craftsmen in Israel and bringing beautiful artwork, and delicious foods from Israel into your home. For more information on our subscriptions click here