Happy Jerusalem Day!

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Here's looking at you, Jerusalem!
Happy Jerusalem Day today!
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Photo of the Damascus Gate into the Old City, during the Light Festival in June 2014.
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Jerusalem Day

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Happy Jerusalem Day!

Here is the view from the roof of the Cenacle on Mt. Zion.
This is the Upper Room where only yesterday Pope Francis celebrated Mass and then headed for the airport and back to Rome.

On the ground floor, exactly under  the domed Room of the Last Supper, is the traditional tomb of King David where Jews worship.
At some stage the place also became a mosque, to complicate matters further.
Its minaret is on the left of the photo, towering over a nun in blue.

The big church is the Dormition Abbey; its bell tower is seen in the center.
Click on the labels below this post for more about these important Jerusalem holy sites.
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(The towers are for ABC Wednesday.)
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Written on stone

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Yesterday the nation celebrated Jerusalem Day.
Forty-five years already since the Six Day War ended, allowing Jerusalem to be put back together.
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The photo is from June 2010 when the Jerusalem Light Festival lit up Damascus Gate in many grand ways.
Yes, it's true, We love Jerusalem.
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Written on stone

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"I love Jerusalem."
Actually, this could be the title of my blog.
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It was part of a changing light show projected onto the Damascus Gate last June during the Light Festival.
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I hope you are able to join me in saying "WE love Jerusalem."
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Today we are celebrating Jerusalem Day.
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Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
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Jerusalem Day

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May the white dove of peace come to nest and rest in Jerusalem.

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Happy 43rd Jerusalem Day today.

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The party's over . . .

Jerusalemites, joined by another 100,000 who came up to the capital yesterday, walked in the Jerusalem Day flag parade through the downtown streets and/or attended national memorial services for soldiers who died defending Jerusalem and/or prayed and then danced and sang at the Western Wall Plaza into the night.
Jerusalem Day is over. The temporary stages and seating were dismantled.

Flags have been trucked away.

Who knows what our situation will be next year at this time.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

Shabbat shalom, Sabbath peace to you.

With Ethiopian-Israelis on Jerusalem Day

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Jerusalem Day today, a national holiday, marking what is called the liberation and reunification of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War.
There were many events in town, many different ways to celebrate and to remember.


My choice was to be at a moving ceremony with these kesim.
A kes is a religious leader of Ethiopian Jewry. Here they are singing the prayers in their holy language, Gez.

I sat among these Ethiopian-Israelis.

Their story is written on the wall of a new monument at Mount Herzl.

Please click to enlarge and read.
Part One is above,

and Part Two is here.

So many memorial candles were lit.

Today's relatively new yearly ceremony is called "The National Ceremony for Ethiopian Jews who perished on their way to Israel."

President Peres had praise for an isolated community that managed to survive 3,000 years of The Exile in the mountains of Ethiopia, unlike the Jews of Nineveh, China, and some parts of India who disappeared.
He lauded their unending dream to return to Israel, which they called "Eretz Jerusalem," the Land of Jerusalem.

There were several big operations to bring masses of Ethiopian Jews home.
One place you can learn about it, as told by the immigrants themselves, is here.

And if you have four minutes please watch a video about the 1991 Operation Solomon in which 14,000 were rescued in 36 hours of continuous airlifts. If your eyes stay dry, let me know.

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Peres talked mostly about Operation Moses, 1984-5.
One out of every three Ethiopian Jews who started the trek, on foot, over the mountains and then through the desert of Sudan to the temporary refugee camps, in other words 4,000 of those people, died before they could be air-lifted to Israel.

This kes came to the podium, opened his ceremonial umbrella, and spoke from the heart, without a written speech, in the spoken language Amharic. His whole family died on the long way to Israel.
The new Minister of Immigrant Absorption also spoke (Hebrew with a Russian accent).
 

I learned that Israel now has 120,000 Ethiopians and a third of them are Sabras (native-born).

These Scouts sang a happy song.

But earlier a man had sung a song in Amharic.
I could only understand the muffled sobs of the women next to me and a groan and a sigh from the men sitting behind me.

There was the religious part--a reading of Psalms, the recital of Kaddish, the cantor singing El Maleh Rachamim.

Then came the laying of wreaths by the VIPs, including the Ambassador of Ethiopia.
I wonder how he felt about all this.

At the end, we all stood to sing our national anthem, Hatikva, The Hope.

Israel has always been built on hope.

As we filed out through a narrow passage, I with the Ethiopian women, my imagination had a few seconds to pretend we were trudging through Sudan together.
Would I have been strong and brave and determined enough to do what they did?
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