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An Undivided Jerusalem:
For Now And Forever
SHELDON ENGELMAYER
Special to The Jewish News
W
hat is a city? It is
where people live,
and work, and love,
and hate, seek amusement
and even escape.-
In the end, however, a city
boils down to its lifeless parts
— bricks, stones, cement, tar,
steel, glass. It is where the
poor can be found sometimes
living on the streets; where
crime can be found, often in
the home or in a park.
A city also is not necessari-
ly unique. The elements that
make one more attractive
than another are transient
and easily transferred. Paris
may be the city of lights, but
the lights burn bright on
Broadway, too.
For Jews, at least, there is
one city that is the exception.
It is not well-lit. Its most basic
parts, the sewers and streets,
are in need of repairs that are
long overdue; its benefactors
tend to overlook the ground
beneath their feet in favor of
gifts more suited to wearing
plaques.
Many of its homes are cold
and dreary and damp in the
winter; in the summer, they
become ovens. And, although
the streets are safe at any
hour, an unattended package
or a car parked aimlessly can
make one's heart stop with
well-grounded suspicion.
It is a city of golden dreams,
nevertheless, where the very
stones go against nature and
have a life of their own. It was
not nostalgia that made Jews
weep for Jerusalem by the
rivers of Babylon. The city
and the people were inex-
tricably fused, and although
they had been ripped asunder,
neither ever abandoned the
other.
Now the time is fast ap-
proaching when Jews must
confront a question to which
many may never have given
thought: Which Jerusalem?
There are two Jerusalems,
after all. There is the western
part of the city that belongs
to the modern world and,
perhaps, to our hearts, but
not to our souls.
And there is the eastern
part, the Jerusalem of our
prayers, the city of David and
Solomon and Ezra and the
Temple, the city for which
Jews for 2,000 years vowed to
forgo their right arms rather
than forget.
That is the Jerusalem
whose return to the Jewish
people is forever fixed on our
minds. We may not recall the
exact moment that we heard,
but we will never forget how
the news touched us — and
where.
It was 9:50 a.m. Israel time,
Wednesday, the 28th day of
Iyar, 5727 — June 7, 1967 —
when Mordechai "Motta"
Gur gave the order to
advance.
Within seconds, his brigade
of young reservists drove
through Lions Gate. They
turned left up the Temple
Mount and down again to the
dingiest collection of stones
piled one atop the other in the
shape of a wall. And then
they cried.
A half-hour later, to the
south, Eliezer Amitai's
Jerusalem Brigade stormed
through Dung Gate and into
the Old City. They, too, stop-
ped at the Wall and cried.
The shofar blown by Rabbi
Shlomo Goren somehow
reached our ears and into the
deepest part of our souls. This
little piece of timeworn real
estate, with its seemingly
endless collection of alley-like
streets and haggling
shopkeepers, had been what
it was all about for two
millennia.
And we cried, too. "We," the
Jews of Israel and of the
Diaspora, religious and
secular, finally had come
home.
Now that is threatened. To
the world at large (and even,
it seems, to the U.S. govern-
ment), Jerusalem again
should be divided and the
eastern portion of the united
city "returned" to Arab
control.
Friday, June 2, is the 28th
of Iyar, Yom Yerushalayim,
Jerusalem Day. There is no
better way to celebrate that
day than by sending a
message to Washington and
elsewhere: However each of
us feels about "land for
peace," there is one com-
promise we cannot make.
Pray for the peace, for
Jerusalem. Pray for the soul
of a people. And then write to
President Bush, Secretary of
State James Baker and U.N.
Secretary-General Javier
Perez de Cuellar. Tell them
the rivers of Babylon will not
again be filled with our
tears. f:
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WE
CAN'T
RUN
ON
EMPTY.
ir
the actions of priests who hid
Jews during the war.
"This comparison is totally
unacceptable," Emile Touati,
president of the Paris Con-
sistory, the body in charge of
Jewish religious and cultural
affairs, told the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency.
Catholic-Jewish relations
have been strained lately by
the Church's inability so far
to honor an agreement sign-
ed with world Jewish leaders
to remove a Carmelite con-
vent built on the grounds of
the Auschwitz death camp.
The Catholic Church is not
above criticism in the Ibuvier
case, Jean Kahn, newly
elected president of CRIF, told
JTA, "we should not condemn
the Catholic Church in its
totality, for some priests,
bishops and archbishops had
a very courageous attitude
during World War II," he said.
But Nazi-hunter Simon
Wiesenthal told a news con-
ference in Rome last Thurs-
day that it came as no sur-
prise to him.
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I
Sheltering Touvier
Angers French Jews
A,
JEWISH
NATIONAL FUND
GIVE BLOOD
Sheldon Engelmayer is ex-
ecutive editor of the New York
Jewish Week.
N EWS
Paris (JTA) — The defense
by some French Catholics
regarding the sheltering of
the country's most wanted
Nazi collaborator by a dissi-
dent branch of the church has
aggravated already strained
relations with the Jewish
community.
Paul Touvier, 74, who head-
ed the French militia that
worked for the Gestapo in
Lyon during World War II,
was arrested in Nice on May
24 and charged with crimes
against humanity. Reports
said Touvier will plead not
guilty.
Touvier had been given
sanctuary at the Priory of St.
Francis, which belongs to the
excommunicated Roman
Catholic Archbishop Marcel
Lefebvre, a fundamentalist
diehard opposed to the
Catholic-Jewish rapproche-
ment mandated by Vatican
Council II.
French Jews are shocked by
the attitude of some
Catholics, who justify the
haven given Ibuvier by citing
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