Rabbi Goren’s Six Day War Torah scroll returns to the Kotel.
By GIL STERN STERN ZOHARThe iconic 1967 photo of Rabbi Shlomo Goren holding a Torah scroll as he leads the first Jewish prayer session at the Western Wall since 1948.(photo credit: REPRODUCTION PHOTO: BENNY RON)
One of the iconic photographs of the Six Day War depicts IDF chief rabbi Brig.-Gen. Shlomo Goren holding a Torah scroll at the Western Wall for the first Jewish prayer there in 19 years, while a paratrooper blows a shofar in thanksgiving. On Wednesday, that same Torah was set to be brought back to the Old City for a reenactment of the historic moment.Expected to participate in the ceremony were IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot; Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon; Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef and his Ashkenazi counterpart, David Lau; Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of the Western Wall and holy sites; and bereaved families. The ceremony was sponsored by the US and Panama’s Friends of the IDF organization.The reenactment of the Torah scroll’s arrival at the holy site was part of an emotional ceremony during which 66 Torah scrolls from around the world were brought to the Western Wall in memory of the 66 soldiers killed in last summer’s Operation Protective Edge.The scroll that Goren brought to the Western Wall in 1967 had been donated to the IDF by the family of fallen soldier Baruch Shapira, who was killed in the War of Independence; when Goren retired from the IDF in 1972, he took the scroll with him. Earlier this year, after a protracted legal battle, it was returned to the IDF, and in May it was placed at the entrance to the chief of staff’s bureau.(Goren died in 1994.) The ceremony was part of a project initiated by the Yad Lebanim memorial organization.Additional Torah scrolls were donated for the ceremony through the Defense Ministry by the Libi Fund, the Religious Services Ministry and the Western Wall rabbinate.After the ceremony, the scrolls were to be transferred to Yad Lebanim memorial sites and IDF bases across Israel to commemorate the country’s fallen soldiers.“Following a military operation in the full sense of the word, we managed to save Torah scrolls from different periods in time and bring them to Israel to transfer them to the Western Wall and hand them over to Yad Lebanim facilities and IDF bases across the country, to commemorate all soldiers killed in Israel’s wars,” said Yad Lebanim chairman Eli Ben-Shem.“The [Goren] Torah scroll’s arrival at the Western Wall holds a special meaning for the Jewish people, and we are glad that this is being done along with 65 other scrolls. It will enable us to mark a special event in memory of the IDF’s fallen soldiers.”