Yom Yerushalayim: The City of the Great King Reunited

Zion in the Tanakh

Jerusalem first appears as Shalem, the city of Malki-Tzedek, “priest of the most high God” (Genesis 14:18). The Temple was later built on Mount Moriah, where Avraham bound Yitzchak (Genesis 22:2; 2 Chronicles 3:1). The city entered Israel’s history when David took it:

Nevertheless David took the strong hold of Zion: the same is the city of David.

David made the Jebusite fortress his capital, brought the Ark there (2 Samuel 6), and bought the threshing floor of Aravnah where his son Shlomo would build the Beit HaMikdash (2 Samuel 24:18–25). From then on “Zion” names both the hill and the whole people’s hope. Hashem chose it: “For Hashem hath chosen Zion; he hath desired it for his habitation” (Psalm 132:13).

The psalms of Zion are the songs of this day:

I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of Hashem. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem. Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together.

The Jerusalem Talmud (Chagigah 3:6) reads “compact together” (shechubrah lah yachdav) as a city that makes all Israel companions.¹ Psalm 48 calls Mount Zion “the joy of the whole earth … the city of the great King” (48:2) and invites the listener to “walk about Zion … tell the towers thereof” (48:12). Psalm 137, sung by the rivers of Babylon, is the exile’s oath: “If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy” (137:6). That oath is still recited at Jewish weddings.

The prophets refused to let Jerusalem be forgotten, by Israel or by Hashem:

For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness … I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night … and give him no rest, till he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.

Zechariah, prophesying among the poor returnees from Babylon, described a city that was not grand but simply alive: “There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem … And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof” (Zechariah 8:4–5). Hashem promises, “I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem: and Jerusalem shall be called a city of truth” (8:3), and “I will bring them, and they shall dwell in the midst of Jerusalem” (8:8).

A divided city, 1948–1967

In the War of Independence the Jewish Quarter of the Old City fell to the Jordanian Arab Legion on 28 May 1948. Its remaining residents were taken captive or expelled, and in the following years most of its synagogues, including the great Hurva synagogue, were destroyed. The 1949 Armistice Agreement between Israel and Jordan provided for a committee to arrange, among other things, free access to the holy places. That access was never granted.² For nineteen years Jews could not pray at the Western Wall. A concrete wall and barbed wire ran through the center of the city, and Israelis climbed to Mount Zion to look across at the Old City they could not enter.

Six days in June

The Six-Day War was fought from 5 to 10 June 1967. On its first morning Israel’s air force struck Egypt’s, after weeks in which Egypt had demanded the withdrawal of the UN peacekeepers from Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and massed troops on the border. Israel sent word to King Hussein of Jordan through the United Nations that it would not attack if Jordan stayed out of the war. Jordan opened fire on West Jerusalem that same day.³

On Wednesday, 7 June, the 55th Paratroop Brigade under Colonel Mordechai (Motta) Gur entered the Old City through the Lions’ Gate. Gur’s words over the army radio became the most famous sentence of the war: Har HaBayit beyadeinu, “The Temple Mount is in our hands!” Soon afterward Rabbi Shlomo Goren, chief chaplain of the IDF, holding a Torah scroll and a shofar, sounded the shofar at the Western Wall and recited prayers for the fallen.⁴ Soldiers who had never prayed in their lives touched the stones and wept. A week later, on Shavuot, tens of thousands of Jews walked to the Wall.

In May 1968 the government declared 28 Iyar a day of commemoration. On 23 March 1998 the Knesset passed the Jerusalem Day Law, which made it a national day.⁵ Separately, the Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel, passed in 1980, declares “Jerusalem, complete and united,” the capital of Israel. Most other nations have not recognized all of these claims, and Jerusalem’s status remains part of the unresolved conflict.

The Temple Mount status quo

After the war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan decided to leave the day-to-day administration of the Temple Mount compound in the hands of the Islamic Waqf. Under the arrangement that followed, known as the status quo, non-Muslims may visit the Mount at set hours, but Jewish prayer there has not been permitted. Israel retains overall security control. The 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan recognizes Jordan’s special role regarding the Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem.⁶ The arrangement has often been contested, and its enforcement has varied.

There is also a halachic question. Shortly after the war, the Chief Rabbinate ruled that Jews should not enter the Temple Mount. The concern was that one might walk on the place of the Holy of Holies while in a state of ritual impurity that cannot be removed without the ashes of the red heifer (Numbers 19). Many leading rabbis still hold this view. Others, especially in the Religious Zionist world, permit entry to defined areas after immersion. For most observant Jews, then, the Western Wall, a retaining wall of the Temple platform as rebuilt by Herod, remains the place of prayer. That is why “the Kotel” is synonymous with 1967.

How the day is kept

The Chief Rabbinate declared Yom Yerushalayim a minor religious holiday of thanksgiving. Rabbi Isser Yehuda Unterman, then Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, ruled that full Hallel be recited with a blessing. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef held that it should be said without a blessing, and practice still varies, as it does on Yom HaAtzma’ut.⁷ Haredi communities generally do not observe the day as a religious occasion, though they too pray at the Kotel and love the city.

Common customs include:

• Festive prayers: Hallel, the omission of Tachanun, and in some communities festive psalms in the evening service.
• Going up to Jerusalem: tens of thousands gather at the Western Wall. Many walk the ramparts or visit Ammunition Hill, the site of one of the war’s hardest battles, where a memorial ceremony is held for the fallen.
• The Omer: the day falls during the counting of the Omer, on the forty-third day. Many Religious Zionist authorities permit music, haircuts and weddings on it.
• Song and study: Torah study about Jerusalem and the singing of songs of Zion. Naomi Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold,” first performed weeks before the war, became its anthem.
• The flag procession: a large youth march carrying flags through the city to the Wall. Its route through the Muslim Quarter has drawn controversy, and in some years participants have shouted hateful chants. Israeli courts and many rabbis have condemned those chants. They have no place in a celebration of the city of peace.

See our calendar for the dates in a given year. Outside Israel there is no second day.

The Messianic witness

“The city of the great King”

Yeshua loved Jerusalem as a son of Israel. He went up to it for the feasts from his boyhood (Luke 2:41–42), taught in the Temple courts, and wept over it (Luke 19:41). When he taught about oaths, he called it by the title of Psalm 48:

Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King.

He did not treat Jerusalem as an outdated symbol replaced by a heavenly city. To him it was holy because Hashem had placed His Name there, and he expected to return there. “Ye shall not see me, until the time come when ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of Hashem” (Luke 13:35). His disciples were told to wait in Jerusalem (Acts 1:4), and the Ruach HaKodesh was poured out there on Shavuot (Acts 2).

“Until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled”

In his teaching on the Mount of Olives, Yeshua foretold the fall of the city in 70 CE and a long exile:

And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.

The word “until” promises that the treading down will end. From 70 CE, through Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, British and Jordanian rule, the city was governed by others, apart from brief interludes. In 1967 the whole city came under Jewish sovereignty for the first time since antiquity. Many Messianic believers, and many Christians, saw this as connected with Yeshua’s words.

That reading is understandable, and it may prove to be part of the truth. But it must be held with care. The verse does not give a date, and Yeshua never told his followers to watch the headlines to calculate the end. The Temple Mount remains under the Waqf’s administration, the city’s status is contested among the nations, and Jerusalem is not yet “a praise in the earth.” It is wiser to say that 1967 was a remarkable act of Hashem’s faithfulness toward His city and His people. Whether it marks the fulfillment of “the times of the Gentiles” or a step toward it is known to the Father (Acts 1:7). The Sages warned against calculating the end (b. Sanhedrin 97b), and Yeshua said, “of that day and that hour knoweth no man” (Mark 13:32).⁸

The prophetic horizon

The prophets do not describe Jerusalem’s future as quiet. Zechariah foresaw a day when the city would be a burden to the nations:

Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about … And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces.

He also saw the end of that struggle: “And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east” (14:4), and “Hashem shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one Hashem, and his name one” (14:9). The verse is recited at the close of every Aleinu. Messianic believers read Zechariah 14:4 together with Acts 1:11–12, where Yeshua ascends from the Mount of Olives and the angels promise he will return “in like manner.” We understand his return as the revelation of Mashiach ben David, who will reign in Jerusalem as Hashem’s appointed King.

Isaiah’s vision is the goal of the whole story:

And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of Hashem, to the house of the God of Yaakov; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the Torah, and the word of Hashem from Jerusalem … nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

The Jerusalem of the prophets is a city of Torah, justice and peace for all nations, where the nations will come up year after year to keep Sukkot (Zechariah 14:16). The Brit Hadashah carries the vision to the end of the age: “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2). The New Jerusalem does not cancel the earthly one. It comes down to earth, and it bears the names of the twelve tribes of Israel on its gates (Revelation 21:12). Hashem’s purpose for Zion is fulfilled, not replaced.

Keeping Yom Yerushalayim

These suggestions are general:

• Pray for the peace of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6), for all who live in it, Jew and Arab, and for the day when it will truly be a city of peace.
• Read the Scriptures of Zion: Psalms 48, 122, 125 and 137; Isaiah 62; Zechariah 8 and 14; Luke 19:41–44 and 21:24; Revelation 21.
• Give thanks with Hallel (Psalms 113–118), or at least Psalm 118: “This is the day which Hashem hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it” (118:24).
• Remember the fallen: many soldiers gave their lives in the three days of fighting for Jerusalem.⁹ Read some of their stories with your family.
• Learn the city: study its history, from David’s conquest to 1967, with a map. If you can, go up to Jerusalem and pray at the Western Wall.
• Turn toward it: Daniel prayed with his windows open toward Jerusalem (Daniel 6:10). Let the day renew that habit of the heart.

“Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces; that ye may tell it to the generation following. For this God is our God for ever and ever” (Psalm 48:12–14).