Changing perceptions lead more Jews to demand complete control over Judaism's holiest site.
By ANDREW FRIEDMANMore Jews demand complete control over Judaism’s holiest site(photo credit: RONEN ZVULUN / REUTERS)
JAFFA GATE, May 6, Independence Day afternoon. A group associated with the Movement to Reconstitute the Temple has called a march through the Old City to the Temple Mount – the theme of the march is “har habayit l’yadeinu!” or “We want the Temple Mount in our hands!” – a play on commander Motta Gur’s emotional call on an IDF communications network when his paratroopers captured the site June 7, 1967.But, as a small handful of marchers gather at the entrance to the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, police waste no time detaining people who look like they could make trouble. Several young men with knitted kippot, long sidelocks and ritual fringes hanging out from under their shirts, for no apparent reason, are detained on the street for questioning. One officer confiscates a roll of posters, presumably calling for Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount, without bothering to open the package to read the material.Eventually, the march begins; no more than 20 people chanting in Hebrew, “We won’t give the Temple to an enemy” and “The people demand the liberation of the Mount.” Police prevent the group from entering the Arab souk, which leads to the Chain Gate entrance to the Mount, and instead steer the procession toward the Armenian Quarter and through the Jewish Quarter.The group is later allowed to move back toward the Muslim Quarter but police have cordoned off the lower part of the street to block it from reaching the Temple Mount.The ensuing standoff lasts 30 minutes, or so, including a few light scuffles when marchers try to break the police cordon.A few protesters are lightly injured but, eventually, police force the procession down a side road leading to the Western Wall Plaza opposite the Jewish Quarter.The police action in preventing the demonstrators from reaching the Temple Mount was clearly intended to forestall any provocative acts in this extremely volatile area. The site often has been a flashpoint for violence between Jews and Arabs.Fast forward a month, however, and what had seemed like a clear police policy to prevent “suspicious-looking” Jews from ascending the Temple Mount suddenly has become not so clear. On the morning of June 3, the day before the Shavuot holiday, police closed the Temple Mount to Muslims under the age of 50 to allow Jews unfettered access to the courtyard on the Mount.According to reports, 400 people visited the site, including individuals who previously had been banned for flouting police rules for non-Muslims at the site, which include praying, bowing or “nationalist gestures.” The Mount was closed again to Jews on Shavuot itself, but opened for expanded hours in the absence of young Muslims the following day. Two hundred people visited. Police spokespeople said no policies have been changed at the site.“Jews are threatening Al-Aqsa” has been a powerful rallying cry for Palestinians for almost 100 years. In 1929, 85 Jews were killed and 150 wounded in Arab riots in Safed and Hebron when rumors spread that Jews were planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which, together with the Dome of the Rock, forms the Haram al-Sharif, the Arab name for the Temple Mount. In 1996, 17 IDF soldiers and 70 Palestinians were killed in bloody riots when Israel opened an exit from the Western Wall leading into the Muslim Quarter. In September 2000, a visit by Ariel Sharon, the leader of the opposition in the Knesset, to the site provided the spark that lit the flame of the second intifada.More recently, Muslims rioted on the Mount throughout the month of April and several times since. Prior to the Passover holiday, police hustled a group of Haredi children off the Mount when Muslims attacked them with rocks. During Passover itself, violence flared after Arabs attacked police with rocks, bottles and bricks that had been stored in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, an off-limits zone for police.THE VIOLENCE continued into May. One Hamas operative reportedly confessed to Israeli interrogators that his organization pays Palestinians to sit outside Al-Aqsa to harass Jews who visit the site. Riots flared on Jerusalem Day, the anniversary of the reunification of the city during the 1967 Six Day War, and at other times.From the establishment of the state in 1948 until 1967, during the period of Jordanian rule, Jews had no access to the Mount. Afterward, when Israel gained control of the Old City, most religious Jews assumed that Jewish law forbade them from ascending the site of the ancient Temple before the arrival of the Messiah. Simply put, the issue was far from the minds of many Jews since the very idea of visiting the Temple Mount was only a theoretical concept.No longer. In Orthodox communities and yeshivas around the world, there is no hotter question today than “Have you been to the Temple Mount?” Whereas once the matter was a nonissue to nearly all Orthodox Jews, one is hard-pressed today to find a mainstream religious Zionist rabbi who will endorse a halakhic stance that visiting the Mount is a violation of Jewish law. “Years ago, there were virtually no rabbinic authorities apart from Yaakov Ariel and Meir Kahane who advocated visiting the Temple Mount,” Rabbi Yehuda Glick, a longtime Temple Mount activist and tour guide at the site, tells The Jerusalem Report.According to Glick, there is now practically wall-to-wall agreement in the religious Zionist world, from moderates such as Rabbis Shlomo Riskin and Yuval Cherlow to the hard-line Rabbi Dov Lior of Kiryat Arba, that one is allowed to visit the Temple Mount. “It is true that one major school, led by Rabbi Shlomo Aviner of the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva, still feels it is inappropriate for Jews to visit the Mount, but they are virtually a lone opinion in our community today,” he says.Glick adds that even parts of the ultra- Orthodox Haredi world are beginning to see the Temple Mount not as a theoretical subject for Jewish prayers, but rather as an opportunity the Jewish people have at this unique juncture in history.“Take someone like Rabbi Meir Mazuz, the head of the Tunisian community in Israel. As long as leading Sephardi Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was alive, he felt he had to remain silent on the issue because Ovadia was 100 percent dead-set against Jews going up to the Temple Mount. But as soon as Ovadia died, Mazuz came out strongly in favor of going up. It’s true, the Haredi leadership has not publicly changed their views on allowing Jews to visit the Temple Mount, but mid-level rabbis and yeshiva heads are quietly ruling that it’s OK,” contends Glick.As a result, the numbers of Jews visiting the Temple Mount skyrocketed to more than 10,000 in 2013. That is a fraction of the 2.3 million visitors to the Western Wall (which is the western wall of the Temple Mount), but the number is not insignificant especially in view of the composition of some of the visitor population and the message they bear. On the eve of Jerusalem Day, May 28, 30 religious Zionist rabbis visited the site and released a statement “expressing the eternal and renewed bond of the Jewish people to the holy place of the Temple Mount and the public claim to declare Jewish sovereignty and Jewish law in practice” at the site.Nor was the visit the first statement in recent months that many high-profile Israelis would like to reconsider the status quo on the site. In February, Likud MK Moshe Feiglin initiated a Knesset debate to discuss “the loss of Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount,” a move that prompted members of Jordan’s parliament to call for the abrogation of the 1994 peace treaty with Israel.MORE RECENTLY, MKs Miri Regev (Likud) and Hilik Bar (Labor) introduced legislation to allot official prayer times for Jews and Muslims on the Mount, an arrangement that would be modeled on the one governing the Cave of the Patriarchs, the major holy site for Jews and Arabs in Hebron. Bar eventually withdrew his support for the bill, but said the absence of basic civil rights at the holy site would continue to be an issue that must be resolved.For his part, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear to the Palestinians, Jordanians and Temple Mount activists in his own Knesset faction that Israel will not change its policy regarding Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount. For the time being, that policy is straightforward.The site is open to non-Muslims at set periods (Sunday to Thursday from 7:30 to 11 a.m. and from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m.).As noted above, non-Muslims are not permitted to pray on the site and Israeli nationalist gestures, such as waving an Israeli flag, is forbidden. It’s a policy the Supreme Court has ruled discriminatory, but the police have defended it claiming that the public security benefits gained by preventing Jews from praying on the Mount far outweigh civil rights issues.Right-wingers don’t buy this. “If we are afraid of riots, we might as well close up shop.” Regev tells The Report. “Every time the Arabs don’t like something they threaten us with a new intifada. Let them riot, I’m not afraid of another intifada. But I am afraid of surrendering our democracy to extremists and I’m afraid of voluntarily deciding that some democratic rights don’t apply here.”Regev stresses that she has no personal interest in visiting the Temple Mount. But she compares the situation to a similar freedom-of-religion issue at a site close by – the right of the Women of the Wall to pray freely at the Western Wall – and she says it is “absolutely outrageous” that basic civil, human rights are being ignored in a democratic country. “I do not accept the status quo. It is outrageous that we ceded control of the Mount to the Muslim Waqf and the Jordanians. Who is the sovereign power here?” she contends.“It is unconscionable that in a democratic country Arabs have freedom of religion but Jews don’t. But every time the Arabs riot, the police close the Mount to Jews – and that’s without Jews praying. And we’re not talking about Jews storming Al-Aqsa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock. Just the sight of Jews in the courtyard is what sets them off. The correct response to Arab riots should be to close the site to Muslims, not to Jews. They’ll figure it out pretty quickly not to attack Jews,” Regev adds.In order to understand the surge in Orthodox Jewish interest in the Temple Mount, it is necessary to take into account two processes that have affected the religious world in recent decades.The first is political. During the Oslo process of the 1990s, the religious-Zionist world warned the Oslo process was a security nightmare that threatened to undo the messianic process that had been set in motion by the Zionist movement. The movement also warned that voluntarily withdrawing from parts of the historic Land of Israel ultimately would not be limited to Judea and Samaria and would ultimately lead the international community to withdraw its support for Israeli control in other parts of the country.THE SECOND process that led to renewed Orthodox interest in the Temple Mount was affected by the fact that Zionism had given rise to halakhic topics that lay dormant for thousands of years. For the first time in 2000 years, the Land of Israel was no longer a theoretical, spiritual ideal, but rather a living, breathing organism to be built and maintained. Long-forgotten halakhic issues such as shmita, the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle, became relevant.“When I was a student in the heart of the religious-Zionist world, it was clear to all of us that going up to the Temple Mount was not part of the game for us,” Rabbi Elchanan Lewis, a graduate of the Mercaz Harav and Beit El yeshivas and currently the rabbi of Congregation Tiferet Avot in Efrat in the Etzion bloc in the southern West Bank.Lewis says that prior to the early 1990s, the idea of visiting the Temple Mount was not even one that religious Zionist yeshiva students would debate. Some major religious Zionist authorities like chief rabbis Mordechai Eliyahu and Shlomo Goren supported building a synagogue on the Temple Mount. But their view was rejected by nearly all halakhic authorities.But as once theoretical issues assumed practical dimensions, growing numbers of Orthodox laypeople and rabbinic leaders began to ask questions that hadn’t been asked in centuries. Individuals took the initiative, sometimes against the wishes of their teachers, and began visiting the Mount.“It is a classic example of a grass-roots movement,” says Yehuda Glick. “In the early decades following the Six Day War, the Temple Mount remained a non-issue for nearly all rabbinic authorities, but eventually ordinary people started asking whether the Temple Mount is in our hands or not. That led to a small trickle of people visiting the site, which in turn forced the rabbis to begin dealing with the issue seriously.”“I can say that my yeshiva head, Rabbi Zalman Melamed, wasn’t crazy about the idea when I asked him in the 1990s about going up [to the Temple Mount],” adds Lewis. “But he didn’t say it was forbidden.So I went. In addition, once the intifada broke out, people began to understand that he who controls the Temple Mount will ultimately control Jerusalem and will ultimately control the Land of Israel. It became very clear to many people that reestablishing our sovereignty on the Temple Mount is the current stage in the mitzva of conquering the land.”For Lewis, there is no question that the time has come to rebuild the Temple. “We do not need the messiah to come. But it is a communal mitzva, incumbent on the entire Jewish people. As such, you need a strong majority consensus to build it. So we’re not there yet. It’s a process, but ironically it will have to emanate from secular Israel, not from the observant world. It’s like the return to the Land of Israel – if the religious world had been the main support for Zionism, it would have created a religious-secular schism. But when the secular Zionists laid the groundwork, we could embrace it with all our might.”Ultimately, there is virtually no chance the Israeli government will change the status quo on the Temple Mount any time soon. Israel’s police and security establishment believe that the potential conflict, at least with the Arab world, could likely present a storm of protest that Israel would be helpless to withstand. And, even in Orthodox circles, the movement to visit the Temple Mount remains small, and individuals who propose rebuilding the Temple can almost be counted on one hand.Still, Rabbi Glick is undeterred.“Do I think we’ll win this fight tomorrow, or the next day? No. But, no, I’m not worried. Let it take a generation or two. Or five. The Temple Mount is the heart and soul of this nation, and of the world, whether or not people realize it. So let it take time. You know what we say – the Eternal People are not afraid of a long path.”
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