Jerusalem Day Memories, Rabbi Berel Wein

Since 1967 Israel gave away Sinai, Gaza, much of the 'West Bank', the Temple Mount, recognized the establishment of a state, fought many wars and endured continuing terrorist attacks, signed a number of meaningless agreements, all fruitless.

This month of June commemorates the forty-sixth anniversary of the Six Day War, an event that changed Israeli and Jewish in myriad ways. Those of us who lived through those fateful and fearsome days recall the foreboding and mental and emotional depression that gripped the Jewish world for the three weeks leading up to the war itself.

The Arabs proclaimed that they would end the State of Israel and throw its Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. The Soviet Union backed the Arabs with its vicious propaganda machine as did the Leftist fellow travelers, many of them Jewish by birth, the world over. Those guys are still around in today’s world though their great patron and perfect society, the Soviet Union, is in the ash heap of history.

The Soviet Union armed Egypt and Syria to the teeth and trained their armies while Britain did the same for Jordan. These three Arab countries united their military commands and confidently proclaimed their victory as being certain before the first shot was even fired. Abba Eban, the then Israeli Foreign Minister, circled the globe’s capitols seeking help for his beleaguered country but finding none.

The ineptitude of the United Nations, the cynicism of the American State Department and the hollowness of the promises of the American President, the anti-Semitism of de Gaulle, all were now blatantly revealed.

I was then a rabbi in Miami Beach and I visited a neighboring church near my synagogue to ask the pastor to sign an interfaith letter supporting Israel that was to be published the next day in the local newspaper. I was shocked and saddened by the vehemence in his voice as he refused to do so. I then realized how truly alone the Jewish people is when push comes to shove

Well, surprisingly Israel won the war in six days, reunited Jerusalem, acquired the Golan Heights and controlled the biblical land of Israel from the Jordan to the sea. The Jewish world was ecstatic, relieved but utterly confused. What was Israel to do with its victory and gains? T

he Arab world remained intransigently opposed to any type of recognition of or compromise with Israel. So Israel began a decades long process of negotiating with itself, slowly but surely frittering away any of the benefits that accrued to it during the war and its aftermath.

Over the decades Israel gave away the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, much of the 'West Bank', the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, recognized the establishment of a neighboring Palestinian state, fought many wars and endured continuing terrorist attacks, signed a number of meaningless agreements, all in a fruitless attempt to achieve a lastingsolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties have never achieved a significant change of the mindset of the population of those countries towards Israel and its right to exist. Those peace treaties by themselves today hang by a thread and certainly cannot be reckoned as being secure and binding by any stretch of imagination.

The Six Day War brought to the Jewish world a sense of unity and solidarity that since then has never been matched. The stark divisions in the Jewish world have since then been magnified and intensified. The political parties in Israel have splintered and subdivided. The personal animosities and the pursuit of ideology – secular and religious – has overcome the realistic practicalities of life and nationhood.

The leaders of Israel have been found wanting – corrupt, politically and morally, in a way that the original founders of the state would find hard to believe. The dream of Greater Israel has been smashed and the reality of lesser Israel offers little comfort and inspiration to many Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora.

Yet, the Russian exile has returned home and the country is strong and relatively prosperous. I see Israel today as being paradoxically more Jewish, if not even more observant, than it was forty-five years ago. But the fire of idealism, of a great dream to be fulfilled is no longer present. We are weary of war and conflict and wary of false peace.

We distrust all of our political leaders with equal disdain and doubt as to their motives and schemes. They betray us on a regular basis – just ask the dispossessed of Gush Katif and now of Beit El.

Somehow the lessons of the Six Day War never were internalized by us so that the memories of that great moment in our history has turned from nostalgia to regret.

History teaches us that when opportunity arises it must be seized. Rarely if ever does it reappear in the same form again.

If I forget You Jerusalem: Yom Yerushalayim 2012

Six Day War vet: I saw significance during battle By MELANIE LIDMAN05/19/2012 22:31Ahead of Jerusalem Day, Shimon "Katcha" Cahaner reflects on the war that changed history 45 years ago.

At 2 a.m. on June 6, 1967, Shimon “Katcha” Cahaner was advancing with his paratroop unit toward the Rockefeller Museum on Sultan Suleiman Street in east Jerusalem, north of the Old City. The street was the scene of fierce fighting and many casualties; soldiers had dubbed it “The Path of Death.”

Almost immediately, their battalion commander was wounded, and Cahaner was thrust into the leadership. As the men crept forward and casualties mounted, he concentrated on the task at hand: advancing toward the museum. But he wasn’t only focused on the present.



“I knew in my head that this was something historic,” Cahaner recalled on Friday, 45 years later. Even in the midst of the heavy fighting, he said, “I knew it was a very important event, and a really important war for the Jewish people.”

On Sunday, as the nation celebrates Jerusalem Day and the anniversary of the reunification of the capital during the Six Day War, the 77-year-old Cahaner, who now lives in Kibbutz Neveh Eitan near Beit She’an, will join dozens of his fellow soldiers along the same road that they fought so hard to capture 45 years ago. At points where they fought with Jordanian forces, the veterans will lay wreaths and honor their fallen comrades.

Cahaner said that even today he gets chills when he drives though east Jerusalem or sees the city from afar, knowing he played a part in its history.

“Every day, I feel the honor that I had to be responsible for Jerusalem,” he said.

“Jerusalem is not the same as any other place.”

Fifteen years ago, on the 30th anniversary of the war, Cahaner took part in a mission that united Israeli commanders who fought in Jerusalem with their Jordanian counterparts.

“It was a really emotional meeting,” Cahaner remembered.

“We were ready to kill each other 30 years ago... But the Jordanians told us, ‘We fought like lions. But you, you fought like people who are ready to give your lives for Jerusalem. Every time we saw people who were wounded, we thought we had stopped you. But it was impossible to stop you.’” That’s the message that Cahaner wants to make sure the younger generation doesn’t forget.

“If we don’t educate about our right to Jerusalem, we could lose Jerusalem,” he said. Without our history, he added, we are nothing.

Veterans from the Six Day War drove that point home symbolically on February 20 of this year, when they removed the giant Israeli flag that flies over Ammunition Hill and locked the doors to protest the government’s lack of funding for the site that memorialized the Battle of Ammunition Hill of June 6, 1967. As they marched with the flag to the Prime Minister’s Residence, Binyamin Netanyahu convened an emergency meeting and, at the last minute, promised a yearly budget of NIS 2 million.

Ammunition Hill, which hosts 150,000 visitors and dozens of army ceremonies each year, reopened the next day, but only after a public outcry forced the government to act.

But Cahaner believes that the government understands the importance of the site, pointing to the fact that Netanyahu will hold the weekly cabinet meeting at Ammunition Hill on Sunday.

Cahaner was the director of Ammunition Hill for 18 years and, after retiring, has been a volunteer for the past decade.

Last year on Jerusalem Day, the annual Dance of Flags march degenerated into violence.

Thousands of participants thronged through the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, chanting “Death to Arabs” while some threw rocks and got into physical altercations. This year, in an effort to reduce tensions, the parade was moved back to the route through west Jerusalem.

What is it like for someone so caught up in this history to watch the celebration deteriorate into violence and arrests? Cahaner is fiercely proud of his role in the capital’s history, but he acknowledged that there are times when the Jerusalem of today is not the Jerusalem he envisioned as he fought in the trenches.

“Today there are clouds over the city – violence and struggle between religious and secular,” he said. Extremism is the biggest threat that the city faces, he said, both haredi extremism and Muslim extremism.

“We need to be realistic and give an opportunity to others, including Arabs, to live and enjoy the importance of this city on a world stage,” he said. “If we can attain peace, this could be the most important city in the world.”

Jerusalem Day March in the Footsteps of the Liberators A dramatic nighttime march followed in the footsteps of the paratroopers who liberated Jerusalem in 1967.

About 100 Israelis took part in a special nighttime march on Jerusalem Day, following in the footsteps of the heroic Israeli paratroopers who liberated the city during the 1967 Six Day War.

The march left at 11:00 p.m. local time from the Lions’ Gate, one of the gatesentering the Old City of Jerusalem and the one where the waiting troops stood in June 1967 when the order "Ben Tzur, move on!" came from COS Mota Gur - ordering them to advance into the narrow streetsdespite fears that the entrance was mined and the possibility of hand to hand fighting. It ended, as the paratroopers' advance did, at the Western Wall.

The march was sponsored by the One Jerusalem organization, in memory of the late Fima Falic, one of Israel's greatest supporters in the U.S. Falic’s wife, Nili, chairs the Friends of the IDF organization in the U.S. and Panama. Falic himself had a special love for Israel and IDF soldiers, and his family continues to support organizations in Israel and abroad.

“This is an historic moment,” one march participant said. “We are so lucky. We are so honored to be here tonight. We’re going to do the same route as the soldiers did 45 years ago. This is amazing.”



He added that the march will become an annual tradition and expressed hope that the march will grow include thousands of people every year.
The march was created last year after several years in which official groups were not given permission to march through the Lions’ Gate.
“Last year, together with the Falic family, we at One Jerusalem rekindled and recreated this important tradition,” said one participant. “Last year we had a very small number of people – maybe ten to 15 people and this year we have a hundred.”