A forbidden visit to the Temple Mount

David Kirshenbaum
Guest Columnist/JPost
14 January '10

The day before the recent wedding of my daughter, Sharona, I had the awesome privilege of accompanying her, together with my son, Elie, to the Temple Mount. In addition to that much-anticipated visit, we had planned on spending the morning together, strolling the streets of Jerusalem, enjoying a father-daughter brunch and tending to last-minute preparations for the wedding. Instead, our visit to the Temple Mount was abruptly cut short and Sharona and I were detained until noon in a Jerusalem police station for actions deemed dangerous to the safety of the public and state.

Only hours after we were removed from the Temple Mount did I learn what it was that the police had determined made us public menaces. During separate questioning, I was asked, "Was your daughter swaying?"

Incredulous, I asked the officer to repeat the question, thinking perhaps I hadn't heard right.

"You know," and the good officer nodded his head back and forth, explaining, in a hostile manner, how that was quite obviously a provocative action and, therefore, an unlawful movement for a Jew to make on the Temple Mount.

AS I watched this officer bobbing his head and telling me why it was so bad and dangerous, what jumped into mind were the episodes in the classic M*A*S*H television series that mercilessly mocked the intelligence and shallow thinking of army brass.

But this was not comedy or satire. It was real, and it was sad. In fact, the shameful combination of the blatant racism of the Wakf, authorized by the government to monitor every movement on the Temple Mount of any non-Muslim visitor (in practice, the authority is primarily exercised in the case of those who appear to be religious Jews) and the craven police appeasement that my daughter and I experienced on her wedding eve surpassed that which I described in these pages in two recent columns ("Intolerance on the Temple Mount," September 27; Where's the compromise over the Temple Mount?).

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