Israel’s latest operation in Gaza, a few weeks ago, ended like most of the other conflicts and campaigns over its 73 years of statehood: in military victory but widespread vilification by the nations of the world: in other words, a bittersweet victory.
But there was one conflict, whose “yahrzeit” is this June, that turned out to be one of the most dramatic and emotional events in modern Jewish history – a mix of Chanukah’s “many in the hands of the few” and Purim’s vena’apoch hu. Those who remember what happened share their memories of the terrifying three-week prelude to the Six Day War and the utter jubilation at its miraculous conclusion.
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It was 1967. After the difficult early days of the new state of Israel, things had settled down. People accepted reality and lived within the “crazy” borders and without Yerushalayim’s Old City and its Kotel.
It was a very different Israel then, a third-world country. Few people had telephones or cars. There was no television. In the poorer neighborhoods of Yerushalayim, people had only one faucet in the house and cooking, heating, and even light were fueled by kerosene.
Yerushalayim was small; you could walk from Geula in the north to its southernmost neighborhood in less then an hour. The Old City, to the east, was like a faraway country behind a barbed-wired barrier. A barren, weed-infested no-man’s-land occupied the space where the light rail turns north today. On Tisha b’Av, people climbed up to Har Zion to gaze at the Old City and the Temple Mount, the site of the Beis Hamikdash. A less welcome sight was the Jordanian soldiers in red-checked kaffiyas with their rifles.
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Rebbetzin Rochel Kelemer came to Eretz Yisrael in 1966 with her husband, Rav Yehudah Kelemer, zt”l (subsequently the longtime rabbi of the Young Israel of West Hempstead). They were newlyweds, one of only a handful of American couples in the Mir Yeshiva. “We lived in the one house on Rechov Hamaapilim in Katamon,” says Rebbetzin Kelemer. “Today, the street goes way down. It was the only furnished apartment we could find, available only because it belonged to a diplomat who was sent to Vienna. In those days, chareidim lived all over the city. The only predominately chareidi neighborhoods were Bayit Vegan and Mattesdorf. The last house in Bayit Vegan was number 84, and there were only two buildings in Mattesdorf.”
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Rabbi Binyamin “Benji” Levene, the grandson of Rav Aryeh Levene, the fabled “tzadik of Yerushalayim,” grew up in America, in Jersey City, and spent his summers with his grandfather in his Nachlaot room.
“My grandfather would get up at 5:30 and go daven in a shul on Rechov Yafo called Zoharei Hachama, opposite Machaneh Yehuda. It was called that because it was in a building with a big sundial on it….I went to shul later, and when I came home, my grandfather wanted to cook me breakfast. First I had to go upstairs to my aunt to get some eggs and olive oil. He didn’t have a stove, just a Primus, which was more like a camp stove. Nest, he took out a frying pan that I was sure came from the Beis Hamikdash. He filled it with olive oil. He would make me an egg; then he gave me some matzas left over from Pesach. I’ve eaten breakfast in many places, but that was the most delicious breakfast I ever had.
“My grandfather was the rav of a little shul,” Rabbi Levene continues, “where many of the members were the underground freedom fighters from pre-State days – the Lechi, the Irgun. They were really tough. Menachem Begin would drop in there, and a seat in the front row still has the name Ruvi Rivlin, today’s president.”
War Is Coming
The lead-up to the war began in mid-May, 1967. Gamal Abdul Nasser, the president of Egypt, decided that the time was ripe to destroy the Jewish state once and for all. Over the course of a week, Nasser mobilized his troops and massed them in the Sinai desert. He blocked the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. And he demanded the evacuation of the UN buffer force in the Sinai. All were acts of war and violations of agreements and guarantees made after the Sinai campaign of 1956. They were accompanied by riotous mobs in the Arab capitals screaming that they would “drive the Jews into the sea.”
The Israelis were terrified. Just 19 years after the founding of the state and 22 years since the Holocaust, Jews were once again threatened with genocide. In America and around the world, Jews davened, collected money and shared in the fear.
Rabbi Dr. Ivan Lerner says, “In the weeks leading up to the Six Day War, I vividly recall my grandfather saying, ‘After pogroms, after six million were murdered, after so many died in 1948, we are now watching another Holocaust about to take place. The world hates Jews, the UN is against us, the U.S. and the Europeans are doing nothing to help Israel. The situation is hopeless.’
“My grandfather wasn’t the only one who thought that. My parents and most of the Jews I knew felt that Israel’s end was near. The fully-equipped armies and air forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria – supported by Jordan. Iraq, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco – combined their resources in order to destroy Israel. They stated their objective – Israel’s annihilation – and amassed huge armies on Israel’s borders poised to attack.”
As Prime Minister Levi Eshkol stalled, trying to gain American support for an Israeli attack, and diplomats scurried around world capitals, the people of Israel languished in anguish and anxiety.
“It is hard to exaggerate what it was like for Israel in those three weeks,” wrote Charles Krauthammer, columnist for the Washington Post. “With troops and armor massing on Israel’s every frontier, jubilant broadcasts in every Arab capital hailed the imminent final war for the extermination of Israel. ‘We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants,’ declared PLO head Ahmed Shuqayri, ‘and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.’”
In Israel, all the reservists were called in. The Chief Rabbinate consecrated city parks as cemeteries, and many thousands of graves were dug in Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park. Hotels were designated as first aid stations. The basement bomb shelters of buildings were cleared out, and citizens blackened their windows and packed emergency bags for when the sirens began. The soldiers sat on the borders for two long weeks, waiting for they-knew-not-what, and the cities and villages were emptied of men. The crops were not tended, the economy bled, and future war hero, Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, had a nervous breakdown from the unbearable tension.
Americans Choose
Meanwhile, Americans in Israel had to decide whether to go or stay.
Rosh Yeshiva of Ner Yisrael, Harav Aharon Feldman, was learning in Kollel Chazon Ish in Bnei Brak. Rebbetzin Lea Feldman remembers the dilemma. “We had five children, and we were citizens of America,” she says. “We could escape if we wanted to. My husband went to the Steipler and asked if we should go back to America. The Steipler said, no, don’t go back. Nothing serious is going to happen; it will end in the best way; don’t worry. I remember davening to Hashem: ‘Please, Hashem, I went through hunger and difficult times during World War II. Please don’t let my children do the same.’ One good thing came of it,” says Rebbetzin Feldman. “Our neighbor told us later that he used to look out his window. Every time he saw our children playing on the mirpesset (balcony), it gave him tremendous encouragement.”
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Lieba Brown, who made aliyah about 15 years ago after a long “detour” through Los Angeles, was 18 and on a gap-year program. “I was in Saad, a religious kibbutz right next to the Gaza Strip. One Friday night, I saw the men leave the chadar ochel with guns and jeeps – on Shabbos. I knew something was up. Our leaders came and took us to Yerushalayim. On the way, we passed columns of tanks traveling south. Most of our group went home to the U.S., but I said, ‘This is my home.’ I wrote to my parents that I wanted to stay, and for some reason, they agreed.
“I was sent to a kibbutz in the center of the country, which was supposedly safer. All the windows in the kibbutz were covered with black-out paper, and all the outside lights were off. We practiced walking to the bomb shelters in pitch darkness. Here, too, the men were gone, so they sent us to the fields to harvest the cotton. The kibbutz turned out to be not so safe. It was next to Latrun, the site of a big battle with Jordan. I heard the sounds of battle and saw the smoke and the fighter jets roaring across the sky. It was scary but I wasn’t afraid. I was young, and when you’re young you don’t think anything will happen to you.”
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Rabbi Moshe Juravel, longtime rebbe at the Torah Institute, was a bachur at the time, learning at Slobodka yeshiva in Bnei Brak. He says, “The country was in a state of high alert. The stores were empty. The banks and post office shut down. There was barely any bus service. The men were all drafted. There was great fear. Everyone understood that war was coming. My Rosh Yeshiva, Rav Mordechai Schulman, paid for my ticket to leave Eretz Yisrael.”