Yom Yerushalayim 2023

Today, Friday the 19^th of May, is Yom Yerushalayim, the 56^th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. Like many of you, I’m sure, I remember the events of those days in June, if not quite as though they were yesterday, then at least not as though they were more than half a century ago. But our sense of what Yom Yerushalayim is about has changed over the years, and not so much for the better: in 1967, when the Old City of Jerusalem had been in Jordanian hands for less than two decades (i.e., from when it was lost to the Jordanian Army in 1948 until it was recaptured from that same army in 1967), it felt like a momentary wrong was being righted, like something bad that happened within almost every adult-at-the-time’s lifetime had been fixed and made right. But as the years have passed, we have lost control of that narrative. And, indeed, to read in the press and in the blogosphere about what Yom Yerushalayim really means, the fact that there had been a Jewish presence in the Old City since Ottoman times—and for millennia before that as well—has been forgotten and been replaced with a narrative of conquest and taking-while-the-taking-was-good adventurism. In this narrative, Israel was at war with Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in 1967 and won an incredible victory over all three foes simultaneously, which led to seizing treasures from them: the Golan Heights from Syria, the Sinai from Egypt, and—best and most sacred and important of all—the traditional Jewish heartland of Judah and Samaria from Jordan…including the jewel in that specific crown, the Old City of Jerusalem.

That narrative, which makes Yom Yerushalayim more about the spoils of war and hardly at all about the justification of a wrong that had been perpetrated by the Kingdom of Jordan against the Jewish people for all nineteen years of Israeli independence, is the one I see featured on the pages of the world’s newspapers and on the websites I generally visit to gain as balanced a picture of the world as I can.

I’d like to remember out loud my first visit to Jerusalem, a story I haven’t actually written about before.

It was 1966, the year of my bar-mitzvah. I was a little boy on the cusp of adolescence. As it happened, the summer camp I had been attending in Connecticut on the verdant shores of Lake Oxoboxo closed permanently just the year before. My parents, therefore, had to find some new place for me to spend the summer and, somehow, my mother came across something called the Bar-Mitzvah Pilgrimage that was being offered to the public by the American Zionist Youth Foundation, headquartered in those days at 515 Park Avenue. This was highly uncharacteristic of my parents even to consider: I was not yet allowed to go into Manhattan on the subway by myself (when this was being considered, I was still twelve years old), and here they were considering sending me to the other side of the world in the company of people neither of my parents knew or had ever met. Given the level of protectiveness my parents brought to parenting, it was—to say the very least—uncharacteristic for them even to consider, let alone agree, that I sign on to such an adventure.

And yet they pursued it. I remember the interview I had at 515 Park. A nice man whose name I can’t remember gently probed our reasons for wanting to sign me on. He seemed sympathetic, interested primarily in determining if this was a good idea for as untried and untested a lad a myself. I must have made a good impression because he approved me to sign on. And then, far more amazingly, my parents did sign me on. And off I went. I don’t believe I had ever been in an airplane until that summer. And I certainly hadn’t ever left the United States. This was, and in a dozen different ways, terra totally incognita for me. And for them too, I suppose.

There’s a lot to say about that whole summer, about the youth village near Pardes Hanna that served as our base, about the friendships I made that summer, about the encounter—my first, as far as I can recall—with actual Israelis (i.e., the kind that actually live in Israel, not the Forest Hills version), about our visit to Yad Vashem (a story I’ll write about on a different occasion), about the strange journey I made all on my own to Ashkelon to spend a weekend with a  family of recent Moroccan immigrants chosen (by whom I have no idea) as a reasonable host family for kids like myself despite the fact that no one in the household knew a word of English and my Hebrew-School Hebrew was, to say the very least, limited.

The high point of the journey was our trip to Jerusalem. They waited a week or so—perhaps for jetlag to fade and for us acclimate ourselves to the heat of an Israeli summer—and then we were off. Approaching the city from the west along a road still dotted with blown-up armored vehicles and tanks left in place as a kind of on-site memorial to the men and women who died in 1948 defending the city that the nascent State of Israel had chosen as its capital, I was enthralled even before we got there. And the emotional level of the whole experience only increased once we actually entered the city.

For readers who have been to Jerusalem recently, it would probably be hard to conjure up the correct picture of the city in 1966. Jaffa Road, the main street leading through downtown to the Old City was paved. But there were unpaved streets all over the place. There was no light rail, just the bus. There were public telephones, but you needed special tokens called asimonim to operate them and it was rare to find one that was in working order. The bus station was more like an oriental bazaar than the Port Authority. I’m sure groups that take teenagers abroad these days protect them much more carefully and seriously, but we were permitted to go off on our own all the time. Nor were we required to go off with others; anyone inclined to explore on his or her own was permitted to go off alone. (This was, of course, long before cell phones so there actually was no way to contact any of us once we were all dispersed; the system—to the best of my recollection—was simply to wait at the bus until everybody showed up and then to depart. I don’t recall anyone ever not showing up or getting into trouble while off on his or her own. But I don’t see that being permitted today. (If I remember correctly, I attempted to smoke my first cigarette, a Time, when I was off with some of the other lads on our own wandering the city. Fortunately for my future health, it did not go well at all. We were staying at the Hotel Vienna, a fleabag that I remember thinking my parents wouldn’t set foot in, let alone take a room for the night. But that, of course, only made it more alluring to us boys. This truly was my first great adventure, my first foray into the world beyond Queens. And I was totally sold on the whole thing from the first moment we set foot on Israeli soil.)

But wandering around what was then called the “New City,” came after our first experience of the Old City.

Of course, we could not enter Old Jerusalem, which was in a different country at the time. Or at least under the control of a different country. (One interesting detail I do recall clearly, is that the word “Palestinians” was never used to describe anyone at all; our counselors and teachers referred to the people on the other side of the border as Jordanians or, more generally, as Arabs. The thought that the Arabs of Palestine were anything other than Jordanians I don’t recall anyone expressing ever.)

Our first encounter with the Old City was a visit to the Mandelbaum Gate, the sole access point from Israel to Old Jerusalem. It lives in our collective memory as a symbol of the divided city and that is not at all wrong—but the reality was that it wasn’t much of anything: just a ramshackle link fence with a gate set into it under some tin roofing. There were IDF soldiers on the Israeli side, but you could look through the gate—which was open when we were there—to see Jordanian soldiers and, beyond them, the walls of the Old City. So that was exciting too—I hadn’t ever been at a land border between nations.

To see into the Old City was a different experience, however. We were brought to the top of a six- or seven-story building at the bottom of Jaffa Road, now called Kikar Tzahal, and taken up in an elevator to the roof. And there, for a few coins, you could operate long-distance telescopes like the ones they used to have atop the Empire State Building and so look at the Jaffa Gate in the distance and, slightly, what lay beyond it.

There wasn’t much to see. The famous honey-colored walls looked more white than yellow in the strong sunshine. The gate, the famous Jaffa Gate, was visible, but you could only see a sliver of anything on its other side. There were, I think I recall, some vendors hawking their wares on the outside of the gate and those people we could see almost clearly. It feels as though it should have been a huge disappointment to me, that whole experience: a wall, a big gate, some people selling snacks, the occasional Jordanian soldier. And you didn’t get much time for your coin either: maybe a minute or two. Maybe three. Not more.

So you probably expect me to say how disappointing the whole experience was, especially after having had it hyped so intensely on our way into the city. But it wasn’t disappointing at all. Something within me changed at that specific moment in the trajectory of my adolescence, something that at the time I doubt I could possibly have understood or even identified. My connection to that place—and specifically to the Old City of Jerusalem—was somehow set in stone on that rooftop in 1966. I can’t say how I could have known, but I somehow did know that my life was destined to revolve around that city and that gate, around that place. We weren’t there long. We ended up, if I recall, me and my friends, eating felafel in the Machane Yehudah open-air market, a nice walk straight down Jaffa Road. But some switch had been flicked on, something within me had been permanently and irrevocably altered. I couldn’t have said it in so many words as a lad of thirteen. But when I think back on the story of my life to date, I believe that my destiny to spend the years of my life as a rabbi, as someone to whom Zionism and Judaism would be such allied concepts that neither could possibly exist without the other, as someone whom destiny led to acquire the home in Jerusalem that Joan and I proudly own—the first step on that path I took then and in that place.

I remember that whole summer very fondly. And I look forward to getting back to Jerusalem in just a month and a half. A lifetime has passed since my first visit to Jerusalem. No one today has the kind of experience I had then. But I am richer for having had it. And so I share it with you today as a kind of Yom Yerushalayim gift to you all.