Time to Assert Jewish Rights

It's an obscenity that Jews are forbidden from praying at Judaism's holiest site for fear that muslims will riot. Instead of punishing the islamic thugs for perpatrating violence, peaceful Jewish worshippers are the ones being punished. Israel needs to stop indulging muslim supremacist attitudes and assert Jewish rights. This is not only a problem in Israel but throughout the west in appeasing muslims at the expense of the rights of non-muslims.

After Israel's victory in the six day war, Moshe Dayan, in a foolish gesture of goodwill towards the muslims who had just tried to drive the Jews into the sea, decided to allow the muslim waqf to administer the Temple Mount. Above all the Israelis should have understood that any such gestures of good will to the muslims will never be reciprocated but instead be seen as a sign of weakness which encourages further aggression from the muslims. There is no good will or friendship to be had with them. Israel should lift the ban on Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount and any attempt on the part of muslims to perpetrate violence against peaceful Jewish worshippers should be met with ruthless suppression by police. This is the only way to deal with islamic supremacism, by violently crushing it and demoralizing them and aggressively asserting our own rights.

Intolerance on the Temple Mount
By DAVID KIRSHENBAUM



Last week, our synagogue in Beit Shemesh made its annual High Holy Day week visit to the Temple Mount. We began the tradition six years ago when the site was reopened to non-Muslims. During the first three years following the start of the September 2000 war launched against Israel by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Hizbullah, the government decided to reward Arab terror by barring all non-Muslims from even setting foot on the Temple Mount.

Visiting the Temple Mount is a schizophrenic experience. When standing there, it is impossible not to be awestruck by the magnitude of where you are and the enormity of the colossal events that took place there. It is on the Temple Mount that both the First and Second Temple stood for nearly 1,000 years, where millions of Jews from all over the Land of Israel and the Diaspora made the three festival pilgrimages and where, according to Jewish belief, the Third Temple, ushering in the days of the messiah, is destined to be built. Throughout history, whenever and wherever Jews were engaged in prayer, they faced Jerusalem. And when in Jerusalem, they pray in the direction of the Temple Mount.

It boggles the mind to imagine your family tree and to consider when the last time anybody in the family line had been on the Temple Mount. Might that ancestor have been one of the survivors of the fighting that took place there prior to the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE? Might it have been on Shavuot of that year, the final pilgrimage festival celebrated by the Jewish people prior to the destruction?

But now that I was standing in that holiest of places, which generations of Jews for 2,000 years could only dream of visiting, I was forbidden to pray. Simply moving my lips in whispered prayer could be grounds for removal. Why? Because I am a Jew. And only a Muslim can pray on the holiest site in Judaism. A Jew may not.

DURING THE War of Independence in 1948, the Old City of Jerusalem fell to the Jordanians. Nearly 1,500 Jews, including many women and children, were killed. While it was under Jordanian control, dozens of Jewish synagogues, many centuries old, were destroyed and the cemetery on the Mount of Olives, where Jews have been buried for 2,500 years, was desecrated. For 19 years, no Jew was allowed to set foot in the Old City or pray at the Western Wall, the retaining wall of the Temple Mount closest to where the Temples stood.

In June 1967, when Egypt, Syria and Jordan embarked on a war to annihilate the Jewish state, Israel recaptured Jerusalem's Old City. One of the most stirring announcements in Jewish history was the message transmitted from the front during the Six Day War: "The Temple Mount is in our hands."

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