Itzhak David Goldberg MD, FACR is Director and Chairman Emeritus Angion Biomedica Corp and Professor Emeritus Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Uri was reclining on the sofa in the living room. His weathered 96-year-old eyes were gazing at the curved stone ceiling. “He was such a good guy” he said.
Uri, an esteemed veteran of the Hagana and the IDF defended this Yemin Moshe neighborhood in Jerusalem in 1947 from the rioting Arabs who streamed from the Jaffa Gate toward this 19th century Jewish settlement. Uri, an internationally renowned biochemist with expertise in polyamines and cancer research has been residing in Yemin Moshe with his wife Zohara for decades.
Uri had just been informed that his soon-to-be-discharged soldier grandson had been murdered on October 7th.
Scientists claim that cats can sense human stress. The Yemin Moshe street’s cats were following us as we left Uri’s home on Hatikva Street. Around the narrow street corner, the neighborhood guard accompanied by his German Shepheard dog Hayk were rushing down the slippery stone stairs. Police cars with their sirens blasting sped toward the ancient wall of the Old City and blocked all the gated entrances.
It was a dark eerie night in the military section of the Mount Herzl Cemetery in Jerusalem. We walked gingerly between many fresh graves covered by flowers. Shofar sounds echoed from an adjacent section of the cemetery. A beautiful young widow, married just about a year was eulogizing her hero husband who fell in battle defending his people from the barbaric Hamas terrorists. She spoke with courage and conviction about friendship, love, strength and heroism. There were no dry eyes in the large crowd.
We returned to Yemin Moshe with an American Jewish singer who came to provide moral support to the battling troops.
Several days earlier, on October 7th, 2023, air raid sirens pierced the calm of the beautiful Saturday morning in Yemin Moshe.
This Jerusalem Jewish community founded in 1892 by the British Sir Moses (Moshe) Montefiore and named for him overlooks the Biblical Valley of Ben Hinnom. Gehenna, the English synonym for “hell” is derived from the Greek and Latin but originally from the Hebrew word gehinnom or the valley of the son (Ben) of Hinnom”. It was here that people in antiquity sacrificed their first-born children to idol gods.
The beautiful vista above the Valley of Ben Hinnom is punctuated by the long Wall of the Old City of Jerusalem. This magnificent stone wall with its eight gates and 34 watchtowers was built by the Ottoman Empire in 1538. To the right, behind the Wall are the Zion Gate, the Armenian and Jewish Quarters and to the left beyond the Jaffa Gate are the Christian and Muslim quarters. To the right of the walled Old City rises Mount Zion where according to some traditions King David's Tomb is located (although the Bible states that King David was buried in the City of David and there is an excavated site there with the same claim). Adjacent to it is the Dormition Church where according to Christian tradition Mary is buried. The Church complex incorporates a tall bell tower which overlooks the Valley.
The convergence of the three major religions which have been clashing throughout millennia around the Valley of Ben Hinnom is spellbinding.
On October 7th the church bells joined the piercing sound of the air raid sirens. It was a strange discordant harmony of undulating sirens and a very rapid high frequency urgent sound of the bells. This disharmonious sound was followed moments later by loud booms over our heads. Tracks of the Iron Dome interceptions of rockets from Gaza were visible in the bright blue skies.
In 1623 John Donne wrote the poem “For Whom the Bell Tolls”
“No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thine own Or of thine friend's were. Each man's death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind…”
No century is an island…
Following the battle of October 7th, 1571, all the church bells in Europe tolled.
From the 7th-century Arab Conquest until the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, European and Mediterranean communities confronted the determination of Muslim caliphates and kingdoms to wage Jihad against the “infidels”. As in the past, this objective for a dominant multi-continent Muslim caliphate is omnipresent today.
On October 7, 2014, Michael Novak wrote in the National Review about the Muslim attacks on the Mediterranean communities in the late 16th century:
“The savagery of Muslim attacks on the coastal villages of Italy, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece was ratcheted upwards. Three or four Muslim galleys would offload hundreds of marines, who would sweep through a village, tie all its healthy men together for shipment out to become galley slaves, march away many of its women and young boys and girls for shipment to Eastern harems, and then gather all the elderly into the village church, where the helpless victims would be beheaded, and sometimes cut up into little pieces, to strike terror into other villages. The Muslims believed that future victims would lose heart and swiftly surrender when Muslim raiders arrived. Over three centuries, the number of European captives kidnapped from villages and beaches by these pirates climbed into the hundreds of thousands.”
Gilberg K. Chesterton’s the “Lepanto” poem depicts the Muslim navy readying for battle:
“White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea”
On Sunday, October 7, 1571, naval forces from Spain, Naples, Sicily, Venice and Genoa attacked the Ottoman navy in the Gulf of Lepanto, close to Western Greece.
By nightfall, the European forces defeated the Ottoman fleet and prevented not only the complete occupation of the Mediterranean by the Ottomans, but also an Ottoman invasion of Europe. More than 40,000 men died, and thousands more were wounded,
Never again did the Ottoman fleet threaten Europe from the south. This victory foretold the waning Turkish domination of southern Europe over the next 250 years. An Oct 7th Christian feast was instituted to honor Mary for the Christian victory over the Turks at Lepanto.
As news of the great victory of October 7th, 1571, reached shore, church bells rang all over European cities and the countryside.
There were several additional air raids sirens in Jerusalem following October 7 2023. The sound sequence was identical except a new Roar that followed the siren, bell ringing and the booms of the rocket interceptions. The cheering celebratory roar came from the direction of the Muslim Quarter.
For whom did the bell toll in Jerusalem on October 7th?
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No country is an island…
In his 2017 speech in the Tweeps Forum Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the son of the first president of the United Arab Emirates and its foreign minister stated:
“Let me say this in English so you can understand what I'm saying... Make sure you get it right. There will come a day that we will see far more radical extremists and terrorists coming out of Europe because of a lack of decision-making, trying to be politically correct, or assuming they know the Middle East and they know Islam and they know the others far better than we do. And I'm sorry, but that's pure ignorance,"
Therefore, Europe – “…send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee”.
No nation is an island…
In her Washington D.C. speech to the Federalist Society following the October 7 massacre and the subsequent alarming rise of global antisemitism Bari Weiss, former opinion writer and editor of the New York Times and founder of The Free Press commented:
“When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning sign-a sign that society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.
At first, things like postmodernism and postcolonialism and post-nationalism seemed like wordplay and intellectual games—little puzzles to see how you could “deconstruct” just about anything. What I came to see over time was that it wasn’t going to remain an academic sideshow. And that it sought nothing less than the deconstruction of our civilization from within.
It seeks to upend the very ideas of right and wrong.”
“Therefore, send not to know For Whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee”
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On the Shabbat following October 7, 2023, Uri, my 96 year old friend was back in our Yemin Moshe synagogue. This 125-year-old synagogue overlooks the Valley of Ben Hinnom and offers an expansive vista of the 16th century Ottman wall surrounding the Old City of Jerusalem. As Uri has done every Shabbat for decades, he stood at the podium and with a resolute expression on his face recited the Prayer for the State of Israel:
“Our Father in Heaven, Rock and Redeemer of Israel, bless the State of Israel, the first manifestation of the approach of our redemption. Shield it with Your loving kindness, envelope it in Your Peace…”.