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Stand for Israel Blog

Israeli groups call on lovers of Israel around the world to mark first-ever “Temple Mount Awareness Day”

February 23, 2010

"A view of the Dome of the Rock sitting on top of the Temple Mount, with the new city of Jerusalem spreading behind it."

A coalition of Israeli organizations is calling on Jewish and gentile lovers of Israel to participate in next month’s first annual Temple Mount Awareness Day, set for Wednesday, March 16.

Jewish tradition identifies the Temple Mount as “Mt. Moriah,” the holiest spot in the world: It was there that both the first and second Temples stood; there where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son, Isaac; and is considered the spot where God’s Presence Dwells in this world.

The Mount is holy to Christians not only because of the Jewish roots of Christianity, but also because of the significant role the Temple played in the life of Jesus.

It is holy to Muslims not only because Muslim tradition incorporates the holy sites of other religions (and turns them into Islamic sites), but also because the Koran records that Mohamed ascended to heaven from there. The surface of the Mount–which was plowed down following the destruction of the second Temple in 70 A.D.–is now occupied by two Islamic shrines: The familiar gold-topped “Dome of the Rock” and the Al-Aksa Mosque, the black compound on the Mount’s southern end.

Although Israel regained control of the Temple Mount when Jerusalem was reunified following the Six-Day War, Israel immediately ceded effective power over it to the Islamic Waqf, the Muslim religious land trust. Since then, many Israelis charge, the Waqf has done all it can to undermine Jewish claims to the site and has imposed ludicrous restrictions on them (see this post about a bride arrested the day before her wedding for the “crime” of praying on the Mount).

The group organizing the Awareness Day–which is comprised mostly of organizations on the right–wants to raise awareness about the facts that “non-Moslems are denied the right to pray in groups, and even as individuals” and that Jews are especially subject to “constant degradation,” including being followed and harassed by police and Waqf guards when they attempt visits.

Organizers also want to call on the Prime Minister’s Office to include the Temple Mount among those sites of historical, cultural and religious significance to the Jewish people that will receive government protection and funds for the improvement of access, upkeep, and beautification of the sites.

Further, they want to condemn the Waqf for:

  • Illegal digs causing unparalleled destruction of archeological evidence of the Holy Temple and the historical Jewish presence on the Mount.
  • Endless incitement against the Jewish State and Nation from within the Mosques.
  • Physical attacks against Jews on the Mount and down below at the Western Wall

For more information, go here or visit the group’s facebook page here (be sure you’re logged into your facebook account when you click the link).


Israel Underground: History in the Dirt

In Israel, a land rich with Bible history, renovating your home can lead to archeological revelations.

That’s what happened this month to a couple in Jerusalem’s Old City. A white marble plaque was found that dates back 1100 years, according to Israeli archeologists. Hebrew University Professor Moshe Sharon traced it to 910, when the city was under Muslim rule.

For archeologists and students, Israel is an ideal location for an archeological dig, since interesting finds are everywhere. A few of the recent significant finds:

The Jaffa Gate

A Byzantine-era road in the heart of Jerusalem near the Jaffa Gate beneath present-day David Street was found by municipality workers. The find supports the Madaba Mosaic Map, the oldest known cartographic representation of Jerusalem dating from the 6th century A.D.

Subsequent to the discovery of the street, another Roman artifact was found nearby: an aqueduct from the days of King Herod.

But Jerusalem’s history goes back farther than the Romans. A few fortunate U.S. college students were involved in a  privately-funded excavation that discovered a 231-foot long, 20 foot-high section of stone wall near the Temple Mount. The wall, dating back to the time of King Solomon, was part of a city complex.

Volunteering on an archeology dig in Israel is an excellent way to gain a deeper appreciation of the country’s historical and Biblical context–something the students involved in the wall excavation no doubt discovered–but usually requires a lot of hard work and weather.

Then again–as others have discovered–sometimes, in Israel, archeology finds you.


Netanyahu’s son wins Jerusalem Bible quiz

February 8, 2010

Sara and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flank their 15-year-old son, Avner, as he is named winner of the Jerusalem Bible Quiz. Photo: Isranet

One of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s sons beat out 50 other teenagers to win the Jerusalem region Bible quiz. Avner Netanyahu, 15, will represent the city at the Israeli national competition, where he will compete to represent the Jewish state at this year’s International Bible Quiz, an annual worldwide contest on knowledge of the Hebrew Bible.

The contest includes contestants from Jewish communities around the world and covers the whole of the Hebrew Bible. It is held in Jerusalem each year on Yom Ha’aztmaut, Israeli Independence Day. Since Israelis win so often, there is a separate contest for the top non-Israelis as well.

The Bible contest is a national cultural event founded by David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister: Contestants come to Israel for special events in the weeks before and after the quiz, traveling through the Holy Land, meeting dignitaries, participating in special programs, and going through preliminary tests that winnow the contestants down to the finalists, who appear on the nationally televised quiz. The International contest is always held in Jerusalem, while the Diaspora contest travels to different cities around the country.

The International contest’s winner receives a four-year college scholarship to Bar Ilan University, Israel’s one overtly religious university, which is located just outside Tel Aviv.

The Prime Minister usually asks at least one question during the contest, so Netanyahu may end up quizzing his own son.


The unknown airlift

February 3, 2010

Lovers of Israel usually know about the daring airlifts that brought tens of thousands of Jews home to Israel from Arab countries, often in secret and in the dark of night. Lesser known is another daring airlift that brought home natives of Israel, but these weren’t Jews — they were fallow deer, a type of deer once indigenous to Israel that had disappeared from the Holy Land by the time the modern state of Israel was re-founded.

The 1978 Iranian “deerlift” remains one of the most daring feats and biggest successes of one Israeli general who retired from the military and applied his battlefield zeal to Israel’s then-burgeoning conservationist movement, according to a fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal.

A Bibilical Animal

The Five Books of Moses set out dietary laws that govern what sorts of animals observant Jews may or may not eat. In Leviticus 11:3 and Deuteronomy 14:6, the Torah explains that animals that chew their cud and have cloven hoofs are kosher and animals lacking both signs are not kosher, and therefore cannot be eaten. Deer are among those permitted by the Bible:

These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, the deer, the gazelle, the roe deer, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope and the mountain sheep. You may eat any animal that has a split hoof divided in two and that chews the cud. However, of those that chew the cud or that have a split hoof completely divided you may not eat the camel, the rabbit or the coney. Although they chew the cud, they do not have a split hoof; they are ceremonially unclean for you. The pig is also unclean; although it has a split hoof, it does not chew the cud. You are not to eat their meat or touch their carcasses.

(Rules governing fish and fowl also are covered in the same sections.)

Over the years, some of those animals once abundant in the Holy Land–including the fallow deer–were hunted to extinction or otherwise disappeared from the borders of ancient Israel. In the late 1950s, however, the species was rediscovered in Iran. Says the WSJ:

The Persian fallow deer stands about 3 feet tall at the shoulder, with a tawny coat, white spots and flattened antlers like those of a small moose. In the book of Deuteronomy, the deer was listed as one of the hoofed animals the Hebrews were allowed to eat. The Book of Kings says the animal was tithed to King Solomon by his subjects.

A General’s mission

Gen. Avraham Yoffe, commander of the army division that captured Sharm al-Sheikh in 1956, had been named head of the newly created Israeli Nature and Parks Authority. In the mid 1970s, he began courting Iranian officials, including the brother of the Shah, the then-leader of the Persian state.

Yoffe eventually got permission to capture a few of the fallow deer and re-introduce them to Israel, but his own health and the then-simmering Muslim revolution stymied efforts to get the deer back to Israel. As the Ayatollah Khomeini prepared to wrest power from the Shah, Israeli officials were (appropriately) more concerned with the fate of Iranian Jews than with a few deer. But Yoffee remained focused on the Biblical animal:

At the Israeli Embassy in Tehran, diplomats and intelligence agents were frantically shredding documents and trying to evacuate the 1,700 Israelis living in Iran, says Mr. Segev. For Gen. Yoffe, the clock was ticking since his deal for the deer would collapse with the shah’s government.

At pretty much the last moment, the General–working with Mike Van Grevenbroek, a Dutch zoologist living in Israel–was able to capture 4 deer and, using fake documents showing that they were going to Holland (since the ayatollahs were, er, less friendly to Israel than the Shah had been), got them airlifted home.

Thirty years later, several more of the fallow deer have just been taken from a nature reserve near Haifa in and released into the Judean hills around Jerusalem, where they’ve joined a herd of a few dozen that’s been living there for the past few decades.

In Jerusalem itself, residents can occasionally glimpse the deer running through the long greenbelt that begins with the enormous Gan Sacher park in central Jerusalem and runs south toward the Malcha area, where the Jerusalem mall and a large technology park are located.

To read more about the deer and about the general, who died in 1983, read the rest of the WSJ article here.


US, PA say “nyet!” to more apartments in Jerusalem. Again.

December 28, 2009

Israel’s announced plans today to build 700 new homes in Jewish areas of Jerusalem, instantly drawing rebuke from U.S. and the Palestinian Authority, which denounced the move as “evidence that the Israelis were undermining efforts to restart peace talks,” the New York Times reported.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs quickly issued a statement opposing the plan and saying that Israel doesn’t have the right to build in Jerusalem until its status is resolved:

The United States opposes new Israeli construction in East Jerusalem. The status of Jerusalem is a permanent status issue that must be resolved by the parties through negotiations and supported by the international community.

(The Jewish State, of course, thinks the city’s status is resolved, but the world community still doesn’t recognize it as Israel’s capitol.)

These apartments going up in south Jerusalem touched off a diplomatic dust-up in November.

Though Israel has agreed to a 10-month building freeze in the West Bank, a spokesman for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said that they never agreed to halting construction in Jerusalem.

Last month, the White House got into a kerfluffle over apartments being built in Gilo, a neighborhood in southern Jerusalem that is similar to the neighborhoods in which building is being proposed in these plans — Neve Yaakov, Pisgat Zeev, and Har Homa — in that pretty much everyone agrees that they’re in Israel (as opposed to “settlements”).

No one thinks that these neighborhoods would not be a part of Israel in any “final status” agreement that would grant the Palestinians a state.

Like Gilo, they’re some of the few neighborhoods where it’s still possible for non-wealthy families to buy homes in Jerusalem. Guess that’s not kosher, in the view of the world community.


Christmas in Jerusalem, 2009

An Arab man passes Santa suits on sale in Jerusalem's Old City (Courtesy of ISRANET)

Thousands of Christian pilgrims visited Jerusalem last week to celebrate the upcoming Christmas holiday.  In addition to buying seasonal gifts in local shops, pilgrims visited local churches in the Old City, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

A Christian pilgrim lights candles in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre right before Christmas 2009. (courtesy of ISRANET)


Christians get ready for Christmas, Jewish State helps

December 23, 2009
The Church of the Manger, lit up at Christmas, 2006

Bethlehem's Church of the Manger lit up at Christmas, 2006.

Today, Bethlehem, the ancient city where Christian tradition tells that Jesus was born, lies just at the southern tip of Jerusalem. Driving from the Old City, one would pass Solomon’s Pool (now a concert venue near the Jerusalem Cinemateque) in the shadow of the famed King David hotel and then take a straight zip just 10 or 15 minutes down Derech Hebron–Hebron Road–to the entrance to Bethlehem. Each year, the State of Israel festoons with beautiful lights–some shapes, some just pretty–all of the street lamps so that the whole road to Bethlehem shimmers from the evening into the night. 

Bethlehem is part of the area nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority (Israel retains a security control), though thousands of Bethlehem residents cross into Jerusalem every day for work. Early this month, Israel announced assurances earlier this month that Christian pilgrims will have free access to holy sites.

 (This despite the fact that the PA, Hamas and other terror groups have perverted the history of the once-predominantly Christian holy village  into a now-Muslim town that has produced more than a few suicide bombers.)

Priests, archbishops and friars representing Latin Catholic, Coptic, Greek Orthodox, Franciscan, Lutheran, Anglican, Syrian Orthodox, Ethiopian and Armenian Christian sects met this month with Lt.-Col. Eyad Sirhan, the Druse commander responsible for orchestrating pilgrimages by a diverse collection of Christian faithful, to ensure that worship and visits go smoothly.

The largest ceremonies will be crossing of convoys from Jerusalem to Bethlehem and the midnight mass to be held on Christmas eve at the Church of the Nativity.


Releasing symbols of hope for Gilad’s return

December 16, 2009

Today, under a cloudy Jerusalem sky, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat joined Arab and Jewish children at the Old City’s Jaffa Gate to release homing pigeons to symbolize captive soldier Gilad Shalit’s future homecoming.

As of today, Shalit has been held captive by Hamas for 1,270 days. SFI joins the Shalit family and all of Israel in praying for Gilad’s well-being and his safe return. We take comfort in the words of the Prophet: “So there is hope for your future, declares the Lord. Your children will return to their own land.” (Jeremiah 31:17)

Barkat releases pigeons.Dec09 ISRANET

Praying for Gilad's return. (Photo courtesy of ISRANET)


Hanukkah in Jerusalem, 2009

December 14, 2009

Enjoy these photos of families lighting the second candle of their Hanukkah menorahs on Saturday night in the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem. (All photos courtesy of ISRANET.)

For information on how you can help ensure that families in Israel can celebrate Hanukkah and other Jewish holidays, read more about IFCJ’s Guardians of Israel program.

2nd candle Chan.Mea Shearim. ISRANET2nd candle Chan.Mea Shearim. 2 ISRANET
2nd candle Chan.Mea Shearim. 3 ISRANET