by Ze'ev Ben-Yechiel
“There’s a big problem. The Arabs are desecrating [the Mount]. So for the Arabs it’s allowed and Jews not? If they rule that Jews are not allowed on the mount, then Arabs should certainly not be allowed on it either.”
Several of Israel’s leading rabbis have fired the latest shot in one of modern Israel’s longest-running halachic disputes—whether a Jew may enter the Temple Mount nowadays. Rabbis Ovadia Yosef, Shalom Elyashiv and Chaim Kanievsky recently sent a letter to Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovich, the rabbi in charge of the Western Wall area, asking him to repeat a 40-year-old decree prohibiting Jews from entering the Temple Mount.
The decree was originally signed by most leading rabbis upon the Mount’s capture by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.
The Temple Mount is the area upon which both Holy Temples stood, in which the priests offered sacrifices, and where thrice-yearly convocations of the whole nation of Israel took place during the festivals of Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (Weeks) and Sukkot (Tabernacles).
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