Mount Moriah

General history is full of events in which the Jews were sometimes able to go up to this mount of the Beit ha-Mikdash, and sometimes were not allowed to be there. After the second destruction of the Temple until the revolt of Bar Kokhba there was no restriction. But with that revolt of the year 135 CE, the Emperor Hadrian decided to forbid entry to this place. So the Jews went up to the Mount of Olives, from which Mount Moriah and the ruins of the Temple are very well seen. The Emperor Constantine, who in the 4th century transferred the capital of the Roman Empire from the city of Rome in Italy to Byzantium — the first name of our city of Istanbul — allowed the Jews to enter Mount Moriah only one day a year, the day of Tisha b'Av. Constantine's nephew, the Emperor Julian, known as the Apostate (the one who denied Christianity), in the year 363 gave full freedom to the Jews and even ordered the treasury of the empire to collect funds to build the Third Temple. Whether because of the prayers of the Christians, who did not want this, or the prayers of the Jews, who also did not want a Temple before the coming of the Messiah, the construction work did not continue. The Christian pilgrims who visited Jerusalem gave no importance to the mount, which they used for dumping manure.

We know the Jews did not move away from Jerusalem in that period, because when the Empress Eudocia (401-460) made her pilgrimage to Jerusalem she was acclaimed with great fervour by the Jews, who were able to obtain her permission to go up to Mount Moriah. Spreading this news to other communities, more than 100,000 Jews came to Jerusalem to celebrate Sukkot that same year. But again the protests of the Christians were enough to expel the Jews from Jerusalem until the Muslims came. In between there was a short era of freedom when the Sassanids, with King Khosrow II, and with the help of 30,000 Jews, entered Jerusalem (613-615 CE). But the famous Byzantine emperor Heraclius returned (629 CE) and left the city to the Muslim army under Caliph Omar (638-1099 CE). Rabbi Eleazar ben Kalir (570-640 CE), a Byzantine rabbi who wrote many 'piyyutim' (verses of the classical liturgy that became very well known in certain services such as Tisha b'Av), confirms these facts.

50 years after Omar, the Umayyad rulers of Damascus (Şam), thinking to damage the economy of Mecca, whose only income was the pilgrimage, built a grandiose building with a roof in the form of a golden dome on top of the rock of Mount Moriah, to draw the pilgrims there instead of to Mecca. The Jews were even allowed to build a synagogue, but in another part of the mountain. Between the years 940 and 960 a Karaite named Salamon ben Yeroham, who lived in Jerusalem, wrote that the Jews had no restriction on praying on this Mount. In that period the Muslims in Jerusalem neither damaged nor took over the religious buildings, neither those of the Christians nor those of the Jews. But in 1071, when the Seljuks entered Jerusalem, it seems they both damaged and took over the Christian buildings. This led Pope Urban II, in 1095, to call for Jerusalem to be rescued from the 'infidels'. And this caused the 'Crusades', the first of which was in 1099, when they massacred all the Muslims and Jews of the city. Although they declared that entry to this mountain would not be allowed to those who were not Christians, Maimonides writes that in 1165 he prayed on this Mount; Benjamin of Tudela, who was also there, says that Jews prayed on Mount Moriah.

In 1187 Jerusalem was rescued by Saladin, giving freedom to all beliefs. But soon the debates began among the rabbis, whether Jews should or should not go up to the Mount, for fear of treading on the Holy of Holies — others saying that the Mount without the Beit ha-Mikdash should not be considered a sacred place, and others asserting that one may go up to the Mount after the Messiah comes. In the Ottoman period Sultan Suleiman restored the walls of the city and allowed the Jews to pray only in front of the Kotel ha-Maaravi, which the Franks call 'the Wailing Wall', and not to go higher. After the Crimean War, at the request of the English, the Ottoman authorities allowed everyone to go up to the Mount, except only on Friday, which is the sacred day for Muslims. Although this freedom existed, the rabbis categorically refused to let Jews have it — something that was not well accepted, because we know that Moses Montefiore and Baron Edmond de Rothschild, among many others, took no notice of this refusal.

In the 19th century the pupils of the Gaon of Vilna, Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, arrived in Jerusalem and formed the core of the sect we call the 'Haredim', a group who consider themselves 'Ultra-Orthodox'. They were and are totally opposed to Jews going up to Mount Moriah. In the War of Independence of 1948, General David Shaltiel, commander of the Jewish secret forces in that region, cleared the place of foreigners, but had to withdraw because the place was sacred, and the forces of Jordan took over a large part of Jerusalem, including of course the sacred mount. In 1967, on the second day of the Six-Day War, Colonel Mordechai Gur, commander of that region, declared to the whole world that 'Mount Moriah, 2,000 years after it was lost, is now under the control of the Jewish people'. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, with the Torah scroll in one arm and the shofar in the other hand, made the same declaration. With the intifada of the year 2000 the Mount was again closed to non-Muslims, and in 2003 it was again opened to visits by everyone, on condition that there would be no prayer, neither by the Christian community nor by the Jewish community. Source: F.M. Loewenberg