War Diary

During the 1966–67 year I was invited by Bar-Ilan University to be a guest lecturer for one year. My synagogue in Atlanta graciously granted me a ten-month leave from rabbinical duties and my wife and I plus four children under 12 took up residence in Israel in September 1966. We had no idea that this would be a fateful year culminating in the Six Day War of June 1967.

It was a period of deep economic recession and even deeper political and diplomatic crises topped only by the month of May which was filled with premonitions of a new holocaust. The Arabs sensing the world’s lukewarm support of Israel massed their armies along our borders and were daily threatening our total annihilation. The United Nations issued boilerplate statements asking for “restraint on both sides ” America and Europe were noncommittal and Israel seemed like a sheep being led to slaughter.

The tension was excruciating. I found that one way to relieve the tension was to keep a daily journal of events. That journal became the nucleus of a subsequent book The 28^th of Iyar — which was the very first Yom Yerushalayim — excerpts from which are below. In it I tried to transmit the atmosphere of tension and fulfillment that surrounded those seminal days in the life of Israel.

Israel then was not what it is now. Bethlehem and Jericho and the Golan Heights were in Arab hands. The Old City of Jerusalem was off-limits but there was one suitably situated rooftop in Jerusalem from which one might catch a fleeting glimpse of a corner of the Kosel HaMaaravi. Because of an ugly concrete wall separating one half of Jerusalem from the other one might wander as far as the Mandelbaum Gate at the end of today’s Rechov Shmuel HaNavi but no farther. There was no Sanhedria Murchevet no Ramot no Har Nof no Ramat Shlomo no Ramat Eshkol. All were Arab territory and the Sinai was Egyptian. Israel consisted of a narrow strip of land along the Mediterranean which was all of eight miles wide — vulnerable and apparently helpless.