Today is Yom Yerushalayim. Jerusalem Day. Like so much in Israel this is complex, intense. I don’t remember the Six Day War in 1967. I remember other things that year, like becoming a Brownie and having to do a good deed to turn my Brownie pin right side up.

I am pleased that the pope went to Israel. I hope that Netanyahu and Abbas accept his invitation to come to Rome. If Judaism is about relationships, than creating peace is too. One person at a time. One leader at a time.

I hope that the US recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The Knesset building as we know it was dedicated in 1966, before the Six Day War and is in the Givat Ram section of Jerusalem. The government of Israel has met in Jerusalem since 1949. I wish that media outlets like CNN and the Weather Channel would acknowledge Jerusalem as capital on its maps.

I hope that Israel would uphold the Sobel decision last year and let women davven freely at the Wall–the very wall that was rescued, liberated in the Six Day War. I signed the petition for precisely this. Will you? http://womenofthewall.org.il/2014/05/in-honor-of-jerusalem-day-women-of-the-wall-to-prime-minister-netanyahu-let-my-torah-go/

I hope that women are allowed to sit on ALL bus runs in Jerusalem. While I am going to Kenya to help in the fight against violence against women, girls and LGBT community worldwide, I hope that in Israel there is a decrease in violence against women in Jerusalem!

I hope that Israel will fully absorb the Ethiopian refugees. Today is also Ethiopian Memorial Day, so deemed by that very Knesset that sits in Jerusalem precisely because the Ethiopian Jews longed for Jerusalem. 4000 of them died en route. 125,000 Ethiopian Jews have been resettled in Israel but there are many challenges still ahead. They lag behind the main population in education and poverty. Anti-Ethiopian discrimination (read racism!) is still too common. Sofa Landver, the Immigrant Absorption Minister, wrote on Facebook:

“I know that the absorption of Ethiopian immigrants has not yet finished, but even so I see an opportunity to highlight that with the passage of two decades from the start of this immigration, the community has recorded impressive achievements in every aspect of life in the state. On this day I bow my head in memory of those who did not make it here to realize the dream and vision of thousands of years.”

That dream is the same as Theodore Herzl, “If you will it, it is no dream.” In 1991 the Sheba Choir, Ethiopian immigrant children singing under the direction of Shlomo Gronich sang “The Journey to Israel”:

The moonlight stood fast
Our bag of food was lost.
The endless desert
Cries of jackals
And my mother comforts my little brothers:
“A little bit more, a little more
soon we’ll be redeemed
we won’t stop going
to the land of Israel.”

The hardships did not end when they made it to Israel. The Chief Rabbinate refused to recognize their Jewish status and many had to “convert.”

“In the moon the image of my mother looks at me
Mother doesn’t disappear
If only she were by my side
she would be able to convince them
that I am a Jew.”

 

I hope that today, this day of reunification of Jerusalem, Jerusalem Day that we find a way to reunify all of us–Israelis and Palestinians, men and women, African Jews and European Jews.