26^th November 2014
This article ori­gin­ally appeared on ABC Religion and Ethics
by Alex Ryvchin
THE MURDER OF FOUR RABBIS WAS FELT BY JEWISH PEOPLE BEYOND THE BORDERS OF JERUSALEM. IT WAS AN ATTACK ON THE ABILITY OF JEWS TO ACCESS THEIR HOLY PLACES AND TO PRAY FREELY IN THEIR HOLY CITY.
The medieval Arab geo­graph­er al-Muqaddasi wrote of Jerusalem, “it is a golden goblet full of scorpions.” On Tuesday, 18 November 2014, we learnt just what he meant. A sacred site in the holiest of cities was drenched with the blood of pious men.
The four men murdered inside the synagogue were scholars and teachers, untainted by violence of any kind. They were men of community and family, standing in solemn, reflect­ive prayer in a place of worship.
The timing of the attack was cal­cu­lated to coincide with morning prayers when the syn­agogues of the holy city overflow with the devout.
At the very moment when the attack began, the con­greg­ants in the synagogue were about to recite the Amidah, the central prayer of Jewish liturgy for the last 2,000 years. It calls on a merciful and com­pas­sion­ate God to forgive sins, heal the sick and bring an end to the exile of the Jewish people. It asks God to allow the ingath­er­ing of the Jewish exiles back to the land of Israel, rebuild Jerusalem and restore the Kingdom of David to usher in the period of the Messiah. It concludes with a prayer for universal peace. The Amidah is recited silently and while standing, prefer­ably facing Jerusalem, or if one is in Jerusalem, facing the Temple Mount.
Upon entering the synagogue, the ter­ror­ists would have encountered at least ten men, being the quorum required for public worship, standing silently, with eyes closed. The wor­ship­pers were wrapped in tallit, the tra­di­tion­al Jewish prayer shawl, and some were wearing teffilin, a set of small black leather boxes con­tain­ing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah affixed to the forehead and upper arm with leather straps. These items symbolise the ded­ic­a­tion of mind and body to God in observ­ance of the com­mand­ment in Deu­ter­o­nomy 6:5 – 9.
Silence and serenity would have enveloped that house of prayer as in syn­agogues through­out Jerusalem and the world, inter­rup­ted only by the sounds of whispered prayers and of the gentle, rhythmic swaying of upright men deep in med­it­at­ive prayer.
The son of one of the murdered men, Rabbi Kalman Levine, described how his father was reciting the Shema prayer when he was killed. The Shema is the holiest phrase in Judaism, is said twice daily, and in morning prayers it typically precedes the recital of the Amidah. “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” It is a declar­a­tion of faith and Jewish identity.
The Austrian neur­o­lo­gist and survivor of Auschwitz Viktor Frankl wrote of the “beings who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.” They were also the final words on the lips of the four Rabbis in the Kehilat Yaakov synagogue in Har Nof.
A police officer attending the scene said that the murders were remark­able for their savagery. The victims were hacked to death with an axe and a meat cleaver and shot repeatedly from point blank range as the ter­ror­ists shouted “Alla hu’akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic). Witnesses outside told of survivors running out with “half their faces half missing.”
The Rabbis all lived on the same street in the Jerusalem neigh­bour­hood of Har Nof where the massacre took place. Har Nof is in western Jerusalem within the pre-1967 territory of Israel. The murdered Rabbis leave behind a widow each and a total of twenty four children to be raised without fathers.
The most eminent of the four was Rabbi Moshe Twersky. A renowned teacher and scholar, Rabbi Twersky was the scion of a cel­eb­rated dynasty, the son of a Harvard professor of Hebrew lit­er­at­ure and the grandson of the great Rabbi Solo­veitchik, con­sidered to be the greatest rab­bin­ic­al scholar of the late twentieth century.
The last to die was Sergeant Major Zidan Saif, a thirty year old Israeli-Druze traffic policeman. Saif was the first officer on the scene of the attack and was shot in the head by one of the ter­ror­ists. Video footage of the final moments of the attack shows Saif’s self­less­ness and heroism and the moment when one of the ter­ror­ists runs towards the policeman and shoots him in the face from close range. Saif leaves behind a young wife and a four-month-old daughter. At Saif’s funeral, attended by the Israeli President and thousands of mourners of all denom­in­a­tions and faiths, Saif’s father-in-law recalled a “heroic man who sac­ri­ficed himself for his homeland.” A man who was “worried about his baby, wanted to be near her and would hug her for hours.”
A reporter from the Israeli tele­vi­sion network, Channel 2, went to the Arab neigh­bour­hood of Jabel Mukaber in the south-eastern pocket of the city, where the two ter­ror­ists had lived, to gauge the reaction of the Palestini­an residents to the atrocity. The reporter said he could not find a single person to condemn the attack. Instead, the murders were praised and cel­eb­rated.
The Jordanian par­lia­ment observed a minute’s silence – in honour of the ter­ror­ists. Palestini­an media was awash with cartoons and graphics lauding the slayings. Hamas called the attack “heroic.” Several employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), employed as teachers by the U.N., praised the murders as “wonderful revenge” and prayed for the ter­ror­ists to be accepted in “paradise” as “martyrs.” On the streets of Gaza and in the West Bank, sweets were handed out in cel­eb­ra­tion and loud­speak­ers used for calls to prayer were blaring words of praise for the murderers.
Palestini­an President, Mahmoud Abbas, condemned the murders, albeit in rather tepid language. Abbas’s sup­port­ers – such as Palestini­an Legis­lat­ive Council member, Najat Abu-Bakr, and Fatah Central Committee member, Tawfiq Tirawi – declared that Abbas’s con­dem­na­tion of the murders was only for dip­lo­mat­ic purposes, and not sincere. United States Secretary of State John Kerry said that the attack was the “pure result of incite­ment” by Abbas and his Palestini­an Authority, which for days before the attack had been declaring “days of rage” and urging res­ist­ance to “Jewish con­tam­in­a­tion” of Jerusalem.
From habitual Israel-haters elsewhere there was silence, or else the usual weasel words about “the cycle of violence,” which drew a false moral equi­val­ence between the measures Israel is forced to take to protect its people against armed, violent ter­ror­ists and the murder of holy men in a house of prayer.
Israel is no stranger to terrorist attacks against civilian targets, but this par­tic­u­lar attack was espe­cially abhorrent. The victims were killed as Jews and for being Jews. They were selected to die because they were the most Jewish, while doing the most Jewish thing – praying in a synagogue.
The attack targeting a place of sanctuary has again exposed the vul­ner­ab­il­ity of Israeli society. The murderers were sending a message that they plan the same fate for Jews as has been suffered by Christian and other non-Muslim religious com­munit­ies through­out the Arab Middle East.
Jews outside Israel, including in Australia, have grown accus­tomed to heavily guarded Jewish communal centres and places of worship. But Israel was supposed to be different. Israel was the safe haven where Jews could pray and con­greg­ate in peace and security. Even the Guardian for once overcame its generally hyper-critical attitude towards Israel to state in an editorial: “The sight of prayer shawls drenched in blood stirs the bitterest memories. They are the images of a pogrom. The floor of a house of prayer was turned red.”
Indeed, this attack must be under­stood as an assault on the freedom to practice one’s faith freely and peace­fully access sacred holy sites. This is a right that Israel has been fighting to secure since its creation.
In November 1947, the Palestini­an Arab lead­er­ship responded to U.N. General Assembly res­ol­u­tion 181 (II) – calling for the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into two States for two peoples – by declaring and com­men­cing a civil war against the country’s Jewish pop­u­la­tion. This was followed by a full-scale military invasion of the country by the armies of neigh­bour­ing Arab states. Against the expect­a­tions of most, the Jews prevailed. Egypt, Syria and Jordan signed armistice agree­ments with the new Jewish state of Israel.
Under the agreement with Jordan, the city of Jerusalem, which res­ol­u­tion 181 had recom­men­ded become a corpus separatum (separate body) under inter­na­tion­al control, became another of the post-war world’s divided cities. Jews and Arabs both rejected the idea of an inter­na­tion­al­ised Jerusalem. Israel was recog­nised as the con­trolling authority of the western part of the city and the Jord­ani­ans occupied the eastern part, including the walled Old City and within it, the holy basin.
The Jord­ani­ans guar­an­teed freedom of access for all faiths through­out the Old City and its holy sites. This com­mit­ment was violated from the beginning. The Jord­ani­ans denied all access to Jer­u­s­alem’s holy sites to the Jews. 55 syn­agogues and sem­in­ar­ies in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City were either sacked, desec­rated or entirely destroyed by the Arab Legion. The entire Jewish pop­u­la­tion was eth­nic­ally cleansed from the area. Free access to Jer­u­s­alem’s holy sites for all people was only achieved after the Old City was captured by Israel in the 1967 war following yet another attempt by Israel’s Arab neigh­bours to wipe it off the map.
On 19 June 1967, Israel’s foreign minister, Abba Eban told the U.N. General Assembly that while for the period of Jordanian occu­pa­tion of Jerusalem, “there has not been free access by men of all faiths to the shrines which they hold in unique reverence … Israel is resolved to give effective expres­sion, in cooper­a­tion with the world’s great religions, to the immunity and sanctity of all the Holy Places.”
Just weeks after the con­clu­sion of the war, Israel passed legis­la­tion to guarantee freedom of access to all holy places and to protect them from “desec­ra­tion and any other violation or anything likely to violate the freedom of access of members of the different religions to the places sacred to them.”
Israel had control over all of Jerusalem and the West Bank and was free to admin­is­ter the Old City and the spiritual treasures within it as it saw fit. Yet in an extraordin­ary act of good faith demon­strat­ing its com­mit­ment to free and open worship, Israel agreed that the admin­is­tra­tion of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque would remain with the Waqf (Islamic religious authority). Sur­ren­der­ing effective control of Judaism’s most sacred site was a truly remark­able gesture, con­trast­ing starkly with the gross abuses that had been committed by the Jord­ani­ans.
Currently, the only imped­i­ment to free worship in Jerusalem, except during riots and other dis­turb­ances, is the pro­hib­i­tion on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, the site of the First and Second Temples within which were located the Found­a­tion Stone and the Holy of Holies. Freedom of access and worship has endured unaltered since 1967 and despite the existence of a fringe movement in Israel which calls for a lifting of the pro­hib­i­tion on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, a sentiment that cannot be sup­pressed in a free society, the status quo estab­lished in 1967 has not changed and Israeli leaders have con­sist­ently refused to alter the current arrange­ment.
The great tragedy of the Jerusalem synagogue terrorist attack will not soon be forgotten. It was felt by Jewish people well beyond the municipal borders of Jerusalem. It was an attack on the ability of Jews to access their holy places and to pray freely in their holy city. The murders at Har Nof have trans­formed Jerusalem. The intrusive apparatus of security will once again constrict the city as new measures are intro­duced to protect the lives of civilians.
Herein lies yet another tragedy. The murders are a blow to the very pos­sib­il­ity of any kind of nego­ti­ated peace. Israel has on three separate occasions made offers to the Palestini­ans which would have included Israel and a Palestini­an State sharing sov­er­eignty over Jerusalem without phys­ic­ally rediv­id­ing the city. The pre­dom­in­antly Arab neigh­bour­hoods of the city and the surface of the Temple Mount were proposed as a part of the Palestini­an State. It is unlikely that Israel will ever renew that proposal. Such an arrange­ment pre­sup­poses that both Jews and Palestini­ans in the city could be safe and secure without being phys­ic­ally separated. That prospect now seems more distant than ever.
Alex Ryvchin is the Public Affairs Director
of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry.