Today’s Hebrew date became a day of mourning 83 years before Thursday afternoon’s terror attacks in southern Israel added another tragic story to the saga of Israel’s return to its land., because it is also the anniversary of the 1929 Jerusalem and Hebron massacres.
There was no IDF, no “occupation” in 1929, not even a partition plan to reject, no independent Jewish state in sight despite the Balfour and San Remo Declarations to that effect, but there was terror and murder of defenseless Jews in the Holy Land. Why? Because they were Jews.
The bodies of the tens of Jews murdered in the horrific pogrom that broke out on Friday night, 17 Av (August) 1929 in the Nisan Bak neighborhood of Jerusalem, a short distance north of the Old City’s Damascus Gate, were laid in the morgue over that Sabbath for burial on Saturday night, most to be placed in a mass grave due to the condition of their mutilated bodies.
Upon opening the doors to the morgue after the close of the Sabbath, the undertakers were astounded to hear a baby’s cry. It was one-year-old Shmuel Zefania, assumed dead when found unconscious in his repeatedly-stabbed dead mother’s arms. His brother and sister had hidden under their bed and were spared, but little Shmuel “only” had one eye gouged out and was somehow not killed, awakening, but unable to move, in the dark morgue.
Wednesday afternoon, more than sixty people responded to a newspaper invitation and made their way to the area on the Mount of Olives where the victims are buried. Some spoke of relatives buried there, and the group recited psalms in memory of these pious, unarmed Jerusalem Jews, so cruelly murdered when Sheikh Haj Amin El-Husseini’s incitement caused Arab neighbors of many years to turn on them suddenly without provocation or warning.
The turn of the Jews of Hevron came the day following the Jerusalem pogrom. British police stood by and did nothing in both instances, until they feared that they too were threatened and stopped the wholesale torture and slaughter with one shot fired in the air.
Zefania, now 84, said the Kaddish prayer while facing the Temple Mount across the valley and then the El Male Rachamim prayer in the memory of the victims. He grew up to join the Lechi underground movement fighting to rid Israel of the British mandate, serving under the code name Gilad, and is proud of the family he raised.
The reestablished Nisan Bak neighborhood on Neviim Street near the Damascus Gate to the Old City was then reached on foot through narrow alleys set between two Arab owned stores on the bustling East Jerusalem market plaza. It is undiscernable from the street.
Eight young, idealistic Jewish families, one of them American, have made their homes here in recent years and are waiting for more to join them. The organization that has resettled Jews in Jewish-owned properties in the Shimon Hatzaddik neighborhood nearby promotes this renewal as well.
Some of the homes, most of which have an indentation in their doorposts where a mezuzah once was, and one that served for prayer with an alcove for the Holy Ark, open into an enclosed courtyard where the history of the neighborhood, founded in the 19th century, was related to the group by land of Israel lover, Eyal Davidson.
In 1860, Avraham Bak bought lands and built neighborhoods for Chassidic Jews outside the old city walls. He named them Faithful City and Eshel Avraham, later to be bounded by Mea Shearim to the north. His son, Nisan, built the Tiferet Yisrael Synagogue in the Old City, now called the Nisan Bak Shul, in addition to buying land in Damascus, Jericho and Maale Zeitim in Jerusalem.
The Ashkenazic Prushim Jews did not want to move in with Chassidim, so he turned to the Georgian Jews (or Gruzinim as the Russians called them), a cohesive community exiled from Israel after the Temple’s destruction who held fast to their Jewish traditions, and some of whom had returned to Jerusalem. Here they lived industriously and peacefully until that fateful night in August 1929. The property belongs to their descendants.
MK Tzipi Hotovely, whose parents made aliya from Gruzia after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Deputy Jerusalem Mayor David Hadari and hareidi-religious author and media personality Yisrael Gillis spoke to the crowd in the courtyard, stressing that 1929 is the best proof that Arab hatred is not fueled by Zionist aspirations or “occupation”, but by the very presence of Jews in Israel.
Ezra Yachin, renowned Lechi fighter and author, agreed and had harsh words for the fact that the Temple Mount is not really in Jewish hands. “It says in the Decalogue that there shall be no other gods before Me”, he pointed out, “so how can we leave other places of worship on the holiest site to Jews? How much blood has to be spilled before we realize that there is no chance to make peace with the Arabs here?”
The group asked MK Hotovely to make the memorial day for the Jerusalem martyrs better known to Israeli society. Little did they know that it would soon have another reason to be remembered each year.