On June 7, 1967 — the 28th of Iyar, 5727 — Israeli paratroopers broke through the Lions' Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem and reached the Western Wall. The radio transmission that followed became instantly famous: "Har Habayit b'yadeinu" — "The Temple Mount is in our hands."
The soldiers who said those words were young men who had grown up in a state that existed only because of a 1948 war they'd heard about from their parents. Many of them wept when they reached the Wall. Some of them had never seen it before. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the IDF's chief chaplain, ran through the gate blowing a shofar. It was the end of a six-day war and the end of 19 years in which Jews were barred from their holiest site. For the Jewish world, it was a before-and-after moment.
Im eshkachech Yerushalayim, tishkach yemini — "If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill" (Psalm 137:5)
Three Thousand Years
Jerusalem is mentioned over 600 times in the Hebrew Bible. It's faced in prayer three times a day. "Next year in Jerusalem" ends both the Passover Seder and the Yom Kippur service. A glass is broken at Jewish weddings in memory of the Temple's destruction. For nearly 2,000 years — from 70 CE to 1948, and from 1948 to 1967 when the Old City was under Jordanian control — Jerusalem was a prayer, a longing, a direction you turned your body toward three times a day.
That's the context you need to understand the crying soldiers. They weren't just soldiers who'd won a battle. They were members of a people who had been praying toward that wall for 70 generations.
The Western Wall
The Kotel — the Western Wall — is the last remaining retaining wall of the Second Temple compound, built by Herod the Great around 20 BCE. It's not the Temple itself; it's the outside wall of the platform the Temple stood on. But it's where the divine presence is said to rest most closely, and it's the closest Jews can pray to the site of the Temple.
Every day, tens of thousands of people come — from every country, every Jewish background, every level of observance, and many who aren't Jewish at all. People stuff folded notes into the cracks between the massive stones. People press their foreheads against it. People stand in front of it unable to say anything. The stones are enormous and ancient — some of them weigh hundreds of tons — and they've been touched by so many hands for so long that the lower courses are worn smooth.
If you've never been, it's difficult to prepare for the effect of seeing it for the first time. Something in it is simply older than almost anything else you will ever touch.
Yom Yerushalayim Observances
The holiday is observed primarily in Religious Zionist and Modern Orthodox communities and throughout Israeli national life. In Jerusalem, tens of thousands of people march through the city carrying Israeli flags, ending at the Western Wall. Religious Zionist synagogues recite full Hallel with a blessing. Special prayers for the city are added. There are concerts, celebrations, and community events throughout the day.
The holiday's religious status, like Yom HaAtzmaut, is debated. Communities differ on whether to recite Hallel, whether to say it with or without a blessing, whether this is a religious event at all or a political one. These debates are real and ongoing, and they reflect genuine theological differences about what the modern State of Israel represents in Jewish history.
The Complexity Underneath the Celebration
Yom Yerushalayim is a holiday that comes with genuine complexity attached. The reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 is experienced very differently by different communities — Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish and Arab, religious and secular. Yom Yerushalayim falls at the intersection of deep religious longing and real political reality, and both things are true at the same time. Acknowledging this doesn't diminish the holiday's meaning for those who celebrate it; it deepens it. Real history is always complicated.
"Jerusalem, built as a city that is bound firmly together, where the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, as was decreed for Israel, to give thanks to the name of the Lord."
— Psalm 122:3–4
Jerusalem is the city the Jewish people has been writing letters to for 3,000 years. Psalms that are letters. Prayers that are letters. The inscription on every glass broken at every Jewish wedding — a letter. Yom Yerushalayim is the day to read them aloud. Yom Yerushalayim Sameach!