(JTA) — At a right-wing parade celebrating Jerusalem Day, police arrested both participants and protesters, while marchers assaulted Palestinians and once again chanted racist slogans.
The parade is an annual event that takes thousands of mostly religious Jewish marchers through Jerusalem’s Old City, including its Muslim Quarter. It celebrates the reunification of Israel’s capital following the Israeli capture of the city’s eastern district in the 1967 Six-Day...
(JNS.org) – Celebrations were underway across Israel on Thursday for Jerusalem Day, the national holiday commemorating the city’s reunification in the Six-Day War.
The main feature of the celebrations is the annual flag march in which tens of thousands of people waving Israeli flags walk through the streets of Jerusalem to symbolize the city’s unity.
This year the parade followed the traditional route, departing from downtown...
(FLAME via JNS.org) –U.S. supporters of Israel (which is to say a majority of Americans) must be puzzled—and even embarrassed—by the U.S. administration’s attempted micromanagement last week of Israel’s Jerusalem Day flag parade logistics.
In a gesture of unmitigated chutzpah, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides publicly asked Israel to reroute the march. Nides advised that Israel’s expression of pride at the reunification of its ancient capital...
(JTA) — Jewish extremists shouted racist slogans and clashed with Palestinians during a heavily policed Jerusalem Day march, but there were no major injuries at an event that last year was among the spurs to a deadly conflict.
Police said 50,000 Jews marched through the Old City on Sunday, Jerusalem Day, the Hebrew calendar anniversary of Israel’s capture of the area in the 1967 Six-Day War. A...
The very first Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) was declared in Israel on the 12th of May, 1968. That was the date that coincided with the 28th of Iyar, the one-year anniversary when Israeli troops liberated East Jerusalem and reunited the city for the first time since 1948.
It was also an important cultural date in the United States and elsewhere around the world. It was Mother’s Day.
The Rabbis (Sanhedrin 37A) describe Jerusalem as tiburo shel olam — “the navel, the belly-button of the world!” Let’s contemplate this curious metaphor. The ancients not implausibly considered the Land of Israel (Jerusalem at its heart) as the center of the known world: the crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe. “Jerusalem as Navel” further bespeaks the Holy City’s role as a link to our foremothers...
JERUSALEM — Nearly three of every four Israeli Jews say Yom Yerushalayim, or Jerusalem Day, is “just a regular day,” according to data collected from a survey by the Jewish People Policy Institute’s (JPPI) Israeli-Judaism research project. The findings of the survey suggest those that it is within the religious sectors (which constitute three groups identified in the survey as liberal-religious, national-religious and zionist-Haredi) where the holiday is...
Historians have long distinguished between two types of great leaders. On the one hand, there are those who are gifted with mighty talents and unusually powerful personalities. But they are essentially inward people who are not particularly gregarious and whose greatness often sets them at a distance from their followers. On the other hand, there are those...
