Yom Kippur Eve at sunset. The hills surrounding Jerusalem have donned their grey night garments.
At such moments Jerusalem has a special tragic beauty impossible to find anywhere else. There is a venerableness about it, however, a past and a future intertwining in eternal secrets.
The hilly city and its stone buildings, over all of which there is the sadness of centuries, suddenly awes me. I walk in the old part of the city: these streets contain a prehistoric, old fashioned life which dominates everything about. The sanctity of age is upon everything, and one senses the ancient tale implicit in every stone one treads.
On my way I come upon a Jew, and we walk together to the Western Wall. The Jew is a Rumanian, healthy looking and well built. His appearance is that of a Moldavian peasant. His mother tongue is apparently Rumanian, for his Yiddish is sprinkled with Moldavian expressions.
When I inquired why he had come to Palestine, he answered simply:
“I am just a plain Jew. My parents did not teach me much of the Torah, and except for a few prayers, which I remember by heart from my childhood days, I have forgotten everything I was taught. I even find it very difficult to read. But there is one thing I remember very well: when the peasants used to quarrel with my father they would say: Go to Palestine along with all the other ‘Zhides’ . . . And I heard this more than once when I grew older.
“So I swore that if God would but help me I would go to that land from which the ‘Goyim’ drove us in the ancient days and to which they are now driving us from their countries.”
We approach the Wail. The narrow courtyard before it is crowded with people who filled every bit of space. They were praying the evening prayer, each “minyan” in a separate corner, each group in its own fashion, according to its own rite and with its own melodies. The Sephardim are chanting a prayer with a monotonous oriental melody that is both nasal and guttural. I strain to catch a few words. But in vain. It is unfamiliar, one not to be found in our holiday psalm books. It must be something they brought with them to Morocco from Spain, and thence to Jerusalem.
A second Sephardic “minyan” sang quite different melodies, quite different prayers. The Ashkenazim, too, were divided into separate groups. The accents of the worshippers were either those of Wolhynia or of Poland. I heard no Lithuanian accents.
A HANDSOME YOUTH
A handsome young man, wrapped in a prayer-shawl, stands out from among the worshipping crowd. His head is pressed against a stone of the wall. He makes no sound. There is no motion of his body. For about half an hour he stands thus, motionless, and at the end, when he has finished his silent prayer and caught sight of us, he greets us in perfect Hebrew with a blessing for the new year.
He tells us that he is a Gentile from New York and that his father is a famous lawyer in the Bronx. Two years ago, at the Bikkur-Cholim hospital, the youth was converted. Then he married the daughter of one of the old pioneers of Palestine (the Biluyim), Shayewitz of the colony Ness-Zion. The convert told us the whole story of how he met the girl in London and fell deeply in love with her. When she completed her studies at the London university and left for her home in Palestine, he found it impossible to remain in Europe and followed her. And there, two years ago, he became converted and was married to her.
At the other end of the wall there is a girl from Bukhara. She buries her head in the wall and murmurs a strange prayer in Hebrew. “Father of my soul, God of Abraham, forgive me my many sins, give me relief on this earth and help in the world to come.” The Bukharian rabbi, it turns out, composed the prayer especially for her to say at the Wailing Wall.
FEELS LIKE ORPHAN
I look at the wall, and a feeling of being orphaned grips me. Before my eyes I see a wall which is not an ordinary structure but a tremendous mass of masonry. . . . This is all we have left of our Holy Temple. Of it all, but a wall {SPAN}rem###{/SPAN} to hear witness of our former might.
I stand looking at the mourners, and thoughts flit through my mind. Threads of memory spin themselves to the Talmud in the old bookcase in my old Beth Medrash.
The Talmud says that no iron was used to split the stones of the Holy Temple. What were they to do? King Solomon found a way out. Since he knew the language of the birds, he bade the eagle bring the Shomir from Paradise. And it was the Shomir, insignificant little worm, that cut these giant stones.
In the company of all those who came to pray at the Wailing Wall, I wend my way homeward. I mix with the Jews of Jerusalem, most of whom wear colorful long coats belted with wide girdles. Hoarse shouts fill the air:
“Happy New Year!”
The road back leads through the same covered streets, up hill and down, and upon all rests the sanctity of a strange sadness. I felt that Jerusalem was really pure and holy, and that it is not for naught that one’s heart leaps at the mention of her name.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
