Last month we had a two-day trip with work. The boss called us in for a meeting to plan it. We decided the trip would be to the Galilee and the Golan. We sat and agonized over the trip plan for an hour and a half. At the end of the meeting someone suggested that the next trip should be in November, and should be to Jerusalem. Everyone was very enthusiastic. I said why not go to Jerusalem this time, why wait for November. It was like there was a collective sigh of relief. Everyone wanted to go to Jerusalem.

We had a lovely trip to Jerusalem. We stayed overnight at the Yitzhak Rabin youth hostel. Among other things, our boss, who knows Jerusalem very well, took us up through winding alleyways in East Jerusalem for an evening panorama at the Intercontinental Hotel. I don’t think I’ve been there since I was a small child. I think I remember there being camel rides there. Maybe there still are, if you come in the daytime.

We didn’t take any photos of this trip. The wall at work is still covered with photos from our previous work trip to Jerusalem last winter. There’s one I really like of a friend and me, walking along the city wall, with the Kotel, the Western Wall, and the Dome of the Rock iin the background.

So what is it about Jerusalem? When I was young I felt differently. I did my army service there and hated it. I was in no rush to go back. I think I couldn’t take the intensity of the city, the mixture of different people, different beliefs. The richness of the city was all too much for me.

The endless queuing at the central bus station at lunchtime on Friday’s, anxious to get home for the Shabbat, didn’t help (only to be shooed away because of yet another ’suspicious object’ scare).

Perhaps it takes a more mature person - more at one with one’s spirituality, with the complexity of human nature, more accepting of conflict, of strong emotions, of fiery beliefs - to really fall in love with Jerusalem.

Unless you live there/have always lived there.

True Jerusalemites are fiercely protective of their city, especially those whose families have been there for many generations. There have always been Jews in Jerusalem, I think, ever since the return from the Babelonian exile, in such and such BC.

In the nineteenth century, the population of Jerusalem had a large Jewish majority, a fact which led to the historic move out of the old city, and the establishment of modern Jerusalem. Bish’s great grandfather (or was it his great great grandfather?) settled there with his family, in the Bukharan quarter, in the eighteen eighties.

So tonight ushers in Jerusalem Day, when we commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967. Bish likes telling of the time his father came home from the war in his army uniform and took them to visit the Kotel, the Western Wall, and the old city for the first time. A lot of people have stories of the first time they could go back after the war, after nineteen years of the Jordanian occupation that cut the city in two - excited, starry-eyed, emotional stories.

Many of Bish’s mother’s ancestors are buried on the Mount of Olives, but that of course, was unrecognizable in 1967. Between 1948 and 1967, when Jews had not been allowed to visit their parents’ and grandparents’ and greatgrandparent’s graves on the Mount of Olives, the Arabs had pulled up the Jewish gravestones, many of them very ancient, and had used them to pave streets, the floors of houses, and toilets. Until relatively recently, apparently, these gravestones could still be seen on the sidewalks of East Jerusalem. I don’t know about today.

For two thousand years we prayed to return to Jerusalem, and here we are. It has once again been rebuilt as our capital city. The fact that it is not recognized as such by even our closest of allies in the world is not something that really bothers me any more. If their ambassadors want to schlep up from their embassies on the Tel Aviv coastline for every official event, that’s their lookout. Real estate is expensive enough in Jerusalem even without foreign representatives buying up all the choice spots. With or without their blessing, Jerusalem is in every way the spiritual and governmental center of Israel.

This was my favorite song about Jerusalem when I was a child. I sang it in the school choir. It was a terrible choir and I can’t carry a tune to save my life. But I loved singing this song. This version is sung by Yehoram Gaon, one of Jerusalem’s more famous sons, one of the ‘True Jerusalemites’ I was talking about. Not my favorite singer, but there you are.

By the way, you’ve probably been there before you came here, but one D. Bogner has written quite a lot for Jerusalem Day, and all interesting and eyeopening - so…

Update: Sorry - previously linked to the Moshe Rusack story in a hurry without having read it. Will consider later. I think I’m going to have one or two things to say about it, and the choice to bring it on its own, as told from the eyes of one person, and out of the wider context. There are probably one or two other stories from other angles, that perhaps should be told too or together with, to give perspective.

Another update: When I say context I mean the widest context possible - the context of difficult decisions that had to be made in order to win the war.

People seem to forget that we could very easily have lost that war, and with particularly horrific consequences.