DAVID BEN GURION: HEBRON IS JERUSALEM'S SISTER

Remembering the Hebron Riots, 1929

Pogroms are not spontaneous events, and those of August 1929 were no exception. The affair began August 15, Tisha B'Av, when a few hundred Jerusalem schoolchildren held a flag-waving demonstration at the Western Wall — allegedly inciting a group of Arabs to violence. The next day, following Friday afternoon worship, 2,000 Arabs burst out of the Mosque of Omar on the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount, and came down to the Western Wall, where they chased off the few Jews who were around, beat the shammes, tore up prayer books and burned the little notes stuck in the wall by Jews. It was suspected that the speaker in the mosque that day had incited Arab worshippers to violence. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, later admitted as much.Hebron caught the worst of it — 68 dead — mainly because the Jewish population there was not part of the Zionist movement, whose settlements fared far better because of their clandestine defense units. The Hebron community was made up of a long-settled Sephardic community, as well as many younger religious Jews who had gone there to study in a branch of the Slobodka Yeshiva, the famed Lithuanian mussar institution. The carnage in Hebron was particularly ugly, the mobs having sliced a variety of body parts off of their victims. Just over a half-dozen of the victims were American kids from New York and Chicago who had come to study at the famed yeshiva

Baruch Goldstein and Hebron Ten Years Laterby Ariel Natan Pasko02 March 2004
A new study by Rabbi Dr. Chaim Simons reexamines the Baruch Goldstein massacre, ten years later. What really happened ten years ago, in Hebron, at the Cave of Machpela -- the Tomb of the Patriarchs -- or as the Arabs call it the Ibrahimi Mosque? The short answer everyone "knows," is that Dr. Baruch Goldstein carried out a massacre on the Jewish Holiday of Purim, Feb. 25, 1994. But a new study by Rabbi Dr. Chaim Simons, entitled, "Did or Did Not Dr. Baruch Goldstein Massacre 29 Arabs?" has just appeared for the tenth anniversary of the event. In it, he questions the "common knowledge" and raises some serious issues that need to be addressed.