“Dear Folks, There are few words to describe the euphoria here. It began like this”
IN its early decades, Yeshivas Mir Yerushalayim functioned mainly as a kollel for young married men and drew most of its student body from the local population. In 1960, for example, there were fewer than 200 talmidim, of whom 75% were married. Rav Leizer Yudel Finkel had constructed a three-story beis medrash near the bottom of the Beis Yisrael neighborhood, and many wondered if it would ever be completely filled.
By 1967, there was a small contingent of American talmidim in Mir Yerushalayim, and, situated as they were on the front lines of the conflict, they witnessed the miraculous events of the Six Day War.
Back in November 1948, when the battle of Jerusalem ended, Israeli general Moshe Dayan met Abdullah el-Tell, the Jordanian commander of the Arab Legion, in a home in Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood. With a map of the city spread on the table, they drew a cease-fire line based on their respective military positions. Dayan used a green pencil, giving rise to the term “Green Line.” The space between their lines, including the thickness of the pencil lines, became no-man’s-land, dividing Jerusalem between Israel and Jordan.
The Meah Shearim and Beis Yisrael neighborhoods were right on the border, with no-man’s-land running the length of today’s Sderot Bar-Lev (a.k.a. Kvish Echad). Just one block from Yeshivas Mir stood Mandelbaum Gate, the only official crossing point between the two sides of the city for 19 years.
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