Yerushalayim: A Gift, a Miracle, a Calling

Fifty-seven years ago, three words were broadcast that changed the destiny of the Jewish people:

 Har HaBayit BeYadeinu (“The Temple Mount is in our hands”).

Those words, uttered during the dramatic liberation of Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, did more than describe a military achievement. They announced a spiritual and national turning point, one that reverberates to this day in the heart of every Jew around the world. Rabbi Paul Bloom tells us all about this momentous event.

  The Date That Was Always Destined

This week, we celebrate Yom Yerushalayim, 28 Iyar—a day whose significance was known to Chazal and noted in the writings of Rishonim centuries before 1967. In fact, the Tur (Orach Chaim 580) mentions this day as the yahrzeit of Shmuel HaNavi, the prophet who laid the spiritual foundations for Jerusalem's destiny. In Megillat Ta’anit it is marked as a significant day long before modern history added a new chapter.

 Nothing is coincidental in Jewish history. That the reunification of Jerusalem happened on the yahrzeit of the very prophet who instructed David HaMelech about the future location of the Beit HaMikdash is no mere historical curiosity—it is the unfolding of divine orchestration. Shmuel taught David where the House of God was to be built, and it was David who conquered Yerushalayim and set the stage for his son Shlomo to build the Mikdash. 

 A Dream Reawakened 

For two thousand years, Jerusalem was a dream. A hope. A prayer. Generations of Jews faced its direction, cried over its ruins, and longed for its rebuilding. Even King David, as he wrote in Tehillim, stood outside its gates dreaming of a day he would see it whole and vibrant.

 Then came 1967

 In what can only be described as a miraculous turn of events, Israeli forces—led by commanders who never imagined they’d set foot in the Old City—found themselves standing at the Kotel, the Western Wall, having retaken the heart of Yerushalayim. The spiritual and emotional power of that moment cannot be overstated. In the words of the Gemara in Niddah:

  "Ein ba’al hanes makir b’niso" – *One in the midst of a miracle often doesn’t recognize it.*

 Many didn’t realize it then, and still don’t today. But the truth is, we were—and are—witnesses to a miracle of national rebirth. Yerushalayim was not just a city reclaimed—it was the Jewish soul reawakened.

  A New Jewish Identity

 Before 1967, many Jews in the Diaspora experienced their Jewish identity as something to hide or survive. But after the Six-Day War, something shifted. Jewish pride surged. Even Jews who had been distant from Torah and mitzvot felt a stirring. The return to Yerushalayim became a symbol of resilience, of purpose, of connection.

 Natan Sharansky recalls that for Soviet Jews, their Jewishness had always meant persecution. Suddenly, after Yerushalayim was reunited, it meant pride. Hope. Belonging.

 This national pride ignited the Ba’al Teshuva movement, brought waves of Aliyah, and inspired even secular Jews to reconnect with their heritage. Jews in Rio, in Melbourne, in Johannesburg and Paris began to walk with a different posture—because Yerushalayim was ours again. It gave us all a center of gravity.

  A City of Connection

 Yerushalayim is not just a capital city. It is the ultimate makom hachibur—a place of connection. Between heaven and earth. Between Jew and Jew. Between past and future. It is the place where Avraham Avinu bound Yitzchak, where he named the location "Hashem Yir’eh"—the first half of the word Yerushalayim. Later, Malki-Tzedek, called it "Shalem." The Midrash teaches that Yerushalayim is the union of those two names: Yir’eh and Shalem. Fear and wholeness. Vision and peace.

 In this city, the Torah of Hashem and the faith of Avraham combine. It is here that the nations will one day say:

 "Ki mitziyon teitzei Torah, u’dvar Hashem miYerushalayim"

“From Zion shall come forth Torah, and the word of God from Jerusalem.”* (Yeshayahu 2:3)

 Yerushalayim is the city where all of Israel would gather three times a year, where tribes with different customs and perspectives united in a common purpose. This is the power of Yerushalayim shel matah—to give us a taste of Yerushalayim shel ma’alah.

  A War That Shouldn’t Have Happened

 And yet, this miracle only unfolded because of another inexplicable decision: King Hussein of Jordan, who could have remained neutral, instead chose to enter a war already lost. Deceived by Nasser’s propaganda, he attacked—and thus opened the path for the IDF to liberate East Jerusalem, Yehudah, and Chevron.

 Had he chosen differently, Yerushalayim might still be divided. The Kotel might still be behind barbed wire. The Har HaBayit might still be inaccessible.

 But Hashem had other plans.

  A Day to Remember

 This Monday, on 28 Iyar, we mark Yom Yerushalayim. It is not just a day of military triumph. It is a day of divine intervention, of national rebirth, of spiritual awakening.

 We remember the miraculous victories, the planes that flew untouched through skies thick with Soviet-made missiles. We remember the fear of impending annihilation, just 22 years after the Holocaust—and the utter, divine reversal of expectations.

 And we remember the yahrzeit of Shmuel HaNavi, who envisioned it all and gave David HaMelech the tools to begin this eternal journey.

 And just   as we  saw  great miracles during the Six  Day War and the  reclaiming of all of  Jerusalem, we see great miracles in our current battle with evil. We  hope and  pray that our current battle  will lead to something  even greater  than what happened in 1967.

 Yerushalayim Is Our Future

 Let us never take Yerushalayim for granted. Let us not be blind to the "nissim" unfolding in our time. Let us recognize the spiritual power of this city, the dream of generations realized in our own days.

 Yerushalayim is not just history—it is destiny.

And it is calling to us still.

On the buses

 Some of us rarely if ever put themselves into the hands of Jerusalem's legendary bus service. Others of us, the more adventurous and outgoing kind, use buses whenever we can. Love them or loathe them, our buses are very much part of the fabric of everyday life in the Capital. Our member Zev Hochberg shares with us here a few of his personal experiences.

As a recent newcomer, I’ve been amused by some “only in Israel” moments on bus rides around Jerusalem.

We’re all family!

On a quiet bus ride, a teenage girl is sitting at the window seat; an older man is sitting on the aisle. In walks another teenage girl; the girls notice each other, and after a few moments the second girl approaches the older man and says something quietly to him. He gets up and moves to a nearby seat; she sits down next to her friend, and they chat away. All is calm—until an older woman sitting nearby turns to the girl and sternly, but also lovingly, says “שעשית מה יפה לא זה” (“You haven’t acted nicely”).

The girl protests her innocence, the man says he was happy to get up and let the friends ride together—but the old woman is having none of it. She continues her mussar for a while. But when she gets up to leave the bus, she approaches the girls, gets in a last few words with a big smile, and you can see that she’s just barely restraining herself from giving them a grandmotherly pinch on the cheek!

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

They grow up so fast here

As the bus pulls up to the stop, a very self-assured looking little girl (maybe 10 years old) calls out יורדים אנחנו (“we’re getting off”), and proceeds to hold the rear door open while her little sister (maybe 8), then her littler sister (no more than 6) and finally her littlest sister (around 2 or 3) file off the bus, whereupon she begins to march the whole group home.

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this story?

On a bus in Ramot, a very harried looking man in traditional religious garb gets on, and questions me about the bus’s destination. I answer, and he calms down. A while later, a bus inspector enters and starts to check that everyone has paid their fare. The man turns to me and says: “Two minutes ago a miracle happened to me”.

He pauses. I nod encouragingly to him to continue, and he explains. In his confusion about the bus’s destination when he boarded, he had forgotten to pay—until suddenly, literally moments before the inspector entered, he somehow remembered.

Ah, I ask, is the fine very large? No, he explains, you don’t understand. it’s not about the fine. Can you imagine the terrible chillul Hashem if I hadn’t remembered to pay? A man such as himself, with a long white beard and large black hat.

Indeed, it was even more than a miracle, he elaborated: it was a gilui shechinah, a revelation of the Divine Presence—that’s what it was! God was so concerned about the desecration of His great name that He caused the man to remember to pay!

The man continues in this vein—and expatiates at even greater length when a yeshiva bochur gets on the bus and provides the man with an appreciative audience.

Part of me cannot fail to be moved by the enormous quantity of emunah on display. Another part of me wanders what he’s been smoking. But a large part of me really wanted to ask him if any of his grandsons serve in the army and then to point out gently what an opportunity for a kiddush Hashem that could be.

In praise of Jerusalem -- and the day that celebrates it

Some years ago, Koren Publishers released a unique liturgical work dedicated to Yom Ha’atzma’ut and Yom Yerushalayim. Among its essays, one written by Rabbi Berel Wein, titled simply “Yom Yerushalayim,” explores the holiness and historic significance of the events that occurred on this day.  The following is an edited version of that essay.

It is strange to have to write an essay on the importance and meaning of Jerusalem. If there is ever anything in Jewish life that was self-understood — axiomatic and integral to Jewish societal and personal life and consciousness — it is the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish soul. “Next year in Jerusalem!” is not simply an expression of hope, prayer, and longing, but a symbol of Jewish defiance and continuity.

In Jewish thought and society, Jerusalem, not Rome, is the Eternal City; Jerusalem, not Paris, is the City of Lights. The great Rabbi Meir Simcha HaCohen of Dvinsk, at the beginning of the 20th century, wrote prophetically: “Woe to those who somehow think that Berlin is Jerusalem!”

Jerusalem may have had many imitators, but it had no replacements. Jerusalem remained the heart of the Jewish people just as Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi of 12th-century Spain insisted that the people of Israel was the heart of all humanity — the strongest of all human organs and yet the most vulnerable. The metaphor that all the lifeblood of Jewish life is pumped throughout the Jewish world by the heart of Jerusalem was self-understood in past Jewish generations. It needed no explanation or repetition, no reinforcement or defensive justification.

Even when the Jewish people as a whole were physically and politically separated from Jerusalem, the city was not just a memory or nostalgia; it remained a real and imposing presence in Jewish life and thought. If to some individual Jews it became just another imaginary place because of its distant location and unattractive reality — an old, small, poverty-ridden, dilapidated, backwater buried within the expanse of the Ottoman Empire — in the core Jewish soul, the reality of the city lived and thrived.

Over the past three centuries, Jews slowly have made their way back home to Jerusalem. Under terrible physical trials of privation, persecution, and derision, the Jewish community in Jerusalem grew. By the middle of the 19th century, Jews constituted the majority population in the city. They began to settle outside the walls of the Old City and establish new neighborhoods. The ancient mother city responded to the return of its children to its holy precincts, and Jerusalem became alive again.

After the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in parts of the Land of Israel, Jerusalem became the capital of the State of Israel. Its population has grown exponentially, while cranes and diggers are ubiquitous throughout the city’s expanded boundaries.

After the Six-Day War the city was reunited, and the Western Wall and its adjacent Temple Mount have become once again the center of the Jewish world. A new special day was added to the Jewish calendar to mark the rebirth of the physical Jerusalem in Jewish life and prayer. The Jewish population has grown, and the building of the infrastructure of the city continues apace. The mixed blessings of automobile traffic and constant construction projects affect all Jerusalemites, but they only serve to highlight the unimagined change in the face of the city that has occurred over the past century. Jerusalem reborn is the miracle of our times.

But much of the world resents Jerusalem’s revival. The United Nations wants it to become an “international city,” though the rebuilding of the city worked, and there never has been such successful city management in all human history. No one really seemed to notice the hard fortunes of the city until the Jews began to remake history there.

The Muslim world especially, which had little concern for the fate and fortunes of the city until the Jews returned to rebuild it, wants it to be exclusively Muslim dominated and populated. Many countries do not recognize united Jerusalem as being part of Israel, let alone as its capital city. And even since October 7 most of the latent and obvious anti-Semitism that still poisons the Western world is directed against Israel and Jerusalem.

In their frustration, jealousy, and misplaced religious fervor, Muslim hardliners have encouraged and perpetrated violence in Jerusalem and publicly celebrate the killing of its innocent inhabitants. The attitude seems to be, “Better no Jerusalem than a Jewish Jerusalem.” Jerusalem has always been a flashpoint as its key place in history and in many faiths make it a sensitive issue.

Jerusalem possesses the eternal quality of focusing human attention to think about holiness, closeness, and the struggle for faith. This view of what Jerusalem is all about makes the celebration of Yom Yerushalayim the necessary Jewish response to the opposition and enmity of the world to Jerusalem — to a Jewish Jerusalem.

Yom Yerushalayim is the proper response of Jews to everything that is currently going on in the world. Rejoice in the fact that our generations have lived to see Jerusalem rebuilt in body and spirit, beauty and strength. Walk its streets and breathe its air, see its visions and bask in its memories. Let us appreciate the gifts that the Lord has granted us, and express our thanks for living in such a momentous and historic time.

That is what Yom Yerushalayim represents. That is why it is so special and sacred. That is why it is worthy of commemoration and celebration.

Yom Yerushalayim 5784

Today we partied together to celebrate this happy anniversary of the unification of Jerusalem. Our festive meal was accompanied by a selection of memories from members who were in Jerusalem in June 1967 as well as by some rousing singing from the Kol Rina Men's Choir.

היום חגגנו יחד את יום השנה השמח לאיחוד ירושלים. הארוחה החגיגית שלנו לוותה במבחר זיכרונות מחברים ששהו בירושלים ביוני 1967 וכן בשירה מסעירה של מקהלת הגברים "קול רינה"

Celebrate Yom Yerushalayim with us!

A delicious catered hot dairy meal awaits those who plan to attend our Yom Yerushalayim Luncheon at Hanassi on June 5th. Rabbi Wein will be addressing us and entertainment will be provided by the popular Rinat Jerusalem Men’s Choir. 

A special feature this year will be members sharing recollections of their own experiences on Yom Yerushalayim. Cost is 150₪ per person for members; 175₪ for non-members, by reservation only. Call Esther Schiller at 02 561-1078 to make your reservation or click here. For payment, please call Gladys Wolff at 02 567 1527. 

ארוחה חלבית חמה וטעימה ממתינה לאלו שמתכננים להשתתף בארוחת הצהריים של יום ירושלים בנשיא ב-5 ביוני. הרב ויין יפנה אלינו ובידור יספק מקהלת הגברים הפופולרית רינת ירושלים

מאפיין מיוחד השנה יהיה החברים שיחלוקו זכרונות מחוויותיהם ביום ירושלים. עלות 150₪ לאדם לחברים; 175₪ למי שאינו חברים, בהזמנה בלבד. התקשר לאסתר שילר בטלפון 02 561-1078 לביצוע ההזמנה או לחץ כאן. לתשלום נא להתקשר לגלדיס וולף בטלפון 02 567 1527