Menachem Ben Yashar on the Temple Mount
Menachem Ben Yashar on the Temple MountBeyadeinu Har Habayit

Menachem Ben Yashar, one of the foremost proponents of Jews ascending to the Temple Mount in recent years, has passed away at the age of 98.

Ben Yashar was born in Berlin in 1924; in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, his family managed to escape to Israel (then Palestine).

He completed his education in Israel, earning a Master's degree in Bible Studies from Bar Ilan University, and would also have earned his doctorate, if his tutor had not passed away before reviewing his thesis. Despite this setback, Ben Yashar served as a lecturer in Bible Studies for many years at Bar Ilan.

Following the Six Days' War, Ben Yashar headed a contingent of Jews who numbered among the first Jews to ascend to the Temple Mount, despite the opposition of the Chief Rabbinate. Over the years, he amassed a large number of supporters and the number of those visiting the Temple Mount continued to grow over the next five decades.

A few years ago, Ben Yashar was interviewed by Israel National News and asked for his recollections of Kristallnacht, which occurred when he was 13 years of age.

"My mother owned a small grocery store on the ground floor of our building which catered to Jews who observed the kosher laws," he related. "In the middle of the night, we heard loud noises and we looked out to see SS and police in uniform outside. They smashed everything. To the best of my recollection, the store was joined to our apartment via a passageway and a door, and my parents pushed a closet up against that door to prevent them from getting into our home.

"The Nazis weren't trying to smash up homes, however; at that point what they wanted to do was destroy stores and synagogues," he continued. "My father was afraid that they would take him - what was then called 'detention for protective purposes.' Jews were seized from their homes, arrested, and taken to concentration camps where conditions were dreadful. Anyone with any type of physical disability would die there. My father fled our home, escaping to the apartment above ours where two old Jewish widows lived, and he stayed there for some time. When the SS knocked at our door looking for him, we told them that we didn't know where he was, that he'd disappeared."

Asked whether the Jews realized at the time that Kristallnacht was a turning point in the way the community would be treated in the future, Ben Yashar answered in the affirmative. "Until then, we thought that we would be able to get by somehow until things got better. Following that night, we realized that it was literally a pogrom and we did everything we could to leave. But the rest of the world was not exactly delighted about taking Jews in," he noted.