Thursday, May 13, 2010

Yaalon: Without Jerusalem, There Would be No Tel Aviv


Gil Ronen '
A7 News

Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon reassured a Jerusalem audience at a Jerusalem Day ceremony that the capital will not be divided. Yaalon, who is seen as one of the more steadfast nationalists in the government of Binyamin Netanyahu, said: “Without Jerusalem there would not have occurred the Return to Zion. This should be repeated: Without Jerusalem there would be no Tel Aviv and there would be no State of Israel.” “Let me be clear about this,” Yaalon said in a speech at the Bnei Akiva Yeshivat HaKotel on Tuesday evening. “All the talk about redividing Jerusalem or internationalizing it is 'like dust in the wind and a fleeting dream'” – a quote from Unetaneh Tokef, a Jewish liturgical poem that is recited on the High Holy Days. The audience responded with fervent applause.

Netanyahu had also stressed the Jewish people's connection to its capital of 3,000 years in a Jerusalem Day speech at a yeshiva in another part of the city, Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav, although he disappointed those who hoped for an explicit vow not to freeze construction in Jerusalem. “We are building it,” he said, “we will continue to build it and we will continue to develop it.”

Rabbi Baruch Vieder, head of Yeshivat HaKotel, spoke of Jerusalem as the heart of the Nation of Israel and said that the stones of the Western Wall (Kotel) were “stones with a human heart.” The Kotel, he added, opens the hearts of the Jews who visit it, from the Paratroopers who cried at its liberation to the thousands of Jews who come there every Friday night to sing “G-d, we love You.”

Additional speakers at Yeshivat HaKotel were the Head of Yerucham Yeshiva, Rabbi Eliyahu Blumenzweig; Rabbi Yitzchak Levi of Har Etzion Yeshiva; and Ilan Moreno, whose son Lt.-Col. Emanuel Moreno was a fallen hero of the Second Lebanon War.

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