Jerusalem Day with the Solidarity Guard

The policeman near Damascus Gate watched me with a confused expression, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at.

I had come to the Old City on Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) with the organization Standing Together. Like the other volunteers gathered in the plaza, I was wearing a purple signal vest, identifying me as part of the Solidarity Guard, there to provide protective presence to non-Jewish inhabitants of the Old City during the Flag March.

I’m hardly the only religious Jew involved in this kind of work—there were a number of us among the hundreds of activists assembled that day. But my physical appearance and mode of dress was more similar to the participants in the Flag March, some of whom were already beginning to stream through the ancient gates and into the Muslim Quarter on their way to the Kotel.

This isn’t what I usually get up to on Yom Yerushalayim. This is the day commemorating Israel’s victory over Jordanian forces and the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967. From Israel’s founding in 1948 until the Six Day War, Jews could not enter Jerusalem’s Old City, could not pray at the Kotel.

For those of us who love Jerusalem with our whole being, this is an intensely joyous day. For religious Jews, especially National Religious communities like the one I belong to, it has great spiritual significance as the celebration of a miraculous victory, the realization of a dream held for millennia.

Yom Yerushalayim is celebrated with exuberant prayer, and, especially for young people, gatherings for dancing in the street with flags.

I like to go to the Old City with my friends near the end of the day. We enter the Old City through Jaffa Gate and make our way along the Armenian Quarter, through the Jewish Quarter, all the way to the vast open plaza near the Kotel. There’s live music and joyful dancing. I like to press my way through the crowds to pray by the Wall, to whisper words of thanks against holy stones worn smooth by time.

Three years ago, I visited the Old City with Tag Meir, a group that promotes Jewish values of tolerance and justice, and opposes racist violence. I joined with dozens of volunteers to distribute flowers in the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City, and that was the first time I came face-to-face with some of the darker things that happen on Yom Yerushalayim.

Among the tens of thousands of Jews who visit the Kotel on this day, there are a significant number whose joy curdles into something coarse and menacing by the time they reach the Old City walls as part of the annual Flag March. They parade through the Muslim Quarter in a display of dominance over its residents, chanting threatening slogans. In recent years, this has escalated into physical harassment, property damage and acts of violence.

Jews are all too familiar with this kind of mob aggression. The stories we carry from our exile, and from the Ottoman and British occupations, evoke the dread that surrounded Christian and Muslim holy days. We have passed down memories of cowering in our homes while marauders called for our destruction from under our windows. We know that destruction of our property and targeting of our businesses has historically been part of consuming, escalating violence. We remember our past as a targeted minority in hostile lands, and now we look with trepidation at the rise in antisemitic attacks around the world.

To live in Jerusalem, to pray at its holy sites, to walk freely in its streets, all of this is a privilege, a God-given blessing. That privilege comes with responsibility to care for the city, to protect it and improve it. I can’t accept that a holiday of thanksgiving for this gift will be transformed into a day of fear for any of its inhabitants.

I want to make excuses, to say that the thuggish marchers are just a tiny minority amongst thousands of peaceful celebrants dancing in the streets and streaming to pray at the Kotel, that it’s just young people getting carried away, that the Arab residents of the Old City have provoked and attacked Jews as well, that the media blows the whole thing out of proportion.

All of that might be true, and none of it matters. Threatening and harming people is wrong, and it’s not Judaism. I’m not content to celebrate Yom Yerushalayim with my community in my own peaceful way, shaking my head at the ugliness carried out in the name of Torah and Zionism, pretending it has nothing to do with me.

And that’s how I found myself in the Old City this year, wearing the purple vest of the Solidarity Guard. I’ve received a lot of questions lately about the specifics of my activism, and particularly about my involvement with Standing Together. I intend to address this in a future post. For now, I want to tell you about what I experienced on Yom Yerushalayim itself.

The day started quietly. I was assigned to a group of volunteers stationed near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Flag March would not enter the Old City for hours, but groups of boys were already roaming around, looking for opportunities to act tough. We were given instructions to remain calm, to try to deescalate conflict, to avoid arguing or engaging with marchers, and to document any harassment.

Most of the shops were already shuttered in anticipation of the march. The streets were relatively empty. Some places were marked with hand-written signs: “Owned by a Jew; do not damage,” “Property of the yeshiva; please don’t destroy.”

I had assumed, perhaps naively, that my religious maternal presence would be chastening to the rowdy young Jewish men I encountered. These boys looked like they could be friends of my teenage son. I probably resemble their mothers. Let me tell you, the teens were not impressed.

“Traitor,” they jeered, mocking my head covering and wondering aloud how I had the nerve to be there in such a role. “Whore,” they muttered as they continued on their way.

Groups of Tag Meir volunteers came by with armfuls of bright gerber daisies and encouraging smiles. There were hundreds of them, in contrast to the dozens of participants from when I joined them a few years ago. I felt encouraged that I wasn’t alone. Hundreds of Israelis were galvanized to counteract the ugliness of the march in one way or another. Maybe next year, I thought, there would be even more.

“Chag Sameach,” they said cheerfully. Happy Holiday. “Kol hakavod lach. Tzadika.” Good for you. Righteous woman.

Most of the Jewish visitors I saw were neither hooligans nor humanitarian volunteers. They were Religious Zionist Jews like me, dressed in celebratory white and walking to the Kotel without incident, waving flags. I noticed how some members of the Solidarity Guard would go on alert as soon as they saw any of these people. It was as if all observant Jews were suspect, as though any celebration of Jerusalem might suddenly erupt into brutality, any joyful song might devolve into murderous chanting. It all looked the same to them.

We heard shouting. We followed the noise to a small grocery store, one of the few stubborn businesses that remained open. Several boys were trying to push their way into the store. The owner and a handful of other men were shouting at them to leave, which they did as we arrived. We asked the men to tell us about what happened, and then took up positions around the entrance to the store. We would remain there until the store closed for the day.

“That’s not religion,” said one of the men, gesturing to the departing hooligans. “You’re a religious woman,” he said, looking at me. “You know that’s not religion.”

I nodded and sat down next to him on the steps opposite the store entrance. We introduced ourselves. I’ll call him Samir.

“We could defend ourselves, you know,” said one of the men. He sat down on the steps opposite the store and lit a cigarette.

“I know,” I said.

“But then what would the police do,” he said, gesturing to the security cameras positioned around the market path. “Our businesses get attacked, and they do nothing.”

Another group of boys came barreling through the alley, singing and shouting. They spotted the members of the Guard and kept moving, restricting themselves to a few grumbled insults.

“I don’t know why they have to do that,” said Samir.

“They want to show who’s in charge,” one of the volunteers offered.

I watched a pair of Muslim women buy bags of pitas at the grocery store. There were red gerber daisies tucked into their purses.

“They’re not in charge,” Samir said, “And we’re not in charge. Only God is in charge.”

The time approached for the Flag March to reach the Old City, and the grocery store owner finally closed his heavy metal doors and went home. Our group proceeded to Damascus Gate to meet up with other volunteers and wait for our next instructions. But soon after we gathered there, the police started to remove all of the activists from the Old City. I suppose they wanted to get us out before the marchers arrived.

“What’s with the costume, lady?” I looked over, and saw the policeman who had seemed so perplexed by my appearance. I didn’t get a chance to respond. One of his fellow officers shuffled me along with the other purple-vested activists.

If only, I thought. If only it were that simple, if any part of me could be removed like a costume. If only I could smooth out my identity into something more coherent and reassuring.

“Sorry to tell you,” I imagined saying to the cop, “this is all me.”

Not a traitor, not a righteous woman. A complicated person, living in a complicated city that I love immensely.

Just before we reached the walls of the Old City, I slipped off my purple vest and handed it to another volunteer. I thought I might disappear into the crowd and stay to film the Flag March.

I tried to blend in with a pack of journalists, but the police came and removed them as well. I filmed their evacuation. I stood next to a pair of ultra-orthodox men in hats and frock coats, trying to pass as a wife.

A teenager took off his knitted kippah and shoved it in front of my phone’s camera lens. I kept trying to film, and he flagged down the police.

“She took off her purple vest,” he told them. “I saw her! She had a purple vest and she took it off.”

As a policewoman marched me out through Damascus Gate, I saw one of the marchers stop to watch me with a look of derision.

“What a hillul Hashem,” he said. A desecration of God’s holy name. A disgraceful way for a religious person to act.

I would return to the Old City the next day. I would walk from my home in Armon Hanetziv along the one-time border dividing the city as my husband, a tour guide, told war stories. I would walk all the way to the Kotel to sit and say tehillim, ancient psalms about Jerusalem. But for now, I rejoined my group and put my purple vest back on.