Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 169, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 July 1919 — How Jerusalem Wails [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

How Jerusalem Wails

X z » '^E-KE-00 —Te-ke-oothe • • I notes ring out, poignant, pitiful; “Te-ke-oo.” Once again it resounds in the hoary rifts of the “wailing wall,” remnant of Hebrew glory, symbol of Hebrew fall. Piercing, clear, it heralds a mighty surge of grief. For from the gloom of a hundred souls a cry is wrung, uncanny in the smiling sunshine, writes Marian Weinstein to the Chicago Dally News. Th'b Jews of Jerusalem have come to mourn, to pray. They have brought to their Father the sting of tffeir newest affliction, the fresh page in their long tragedy —the slaughter of their brethren in free Galicia. The bearded elders in their faded caftans bend and sway over their huge tomes. Their earlocks brush the yellowing leaves of prayer. Apart on the cobbled street sit shawled women, sear, fleshless, resting their quivering forms against a native hut. Their younger sisters, old-young women, press the temple ruin. Now they fondle the stones and now they Clutch them in despair, choking dry sobs. Beypnd, a girl is weeping. She has lived through a Russian pogrom. There is a lull in the wail. For a moment the mass of motley headgear—skull caps, turbans, fezzes —ceases to sway. . But only for a moment And now the little Talmud Torah boys come from their schools, tiny replicas, with their side curls and long coats, of their elders. They file in under their rabbi’s eye, a look of awe on their pale faces. All United in Mourning.

Jerusalem has forgotten its squabbles. In this hour of prayer and mourning before their Maker all Jews are brothers. “A dole, a dole,” a wretched bundle of rags whimpers through the. crowd. Between two sputtering candles against the wall a khaki-clad soldier from the Jewish battalion pauses to read the call to this prayer that was posted for days in the streets of the Holy City, in Hebrew and in Yiddish. “Terrible reports come to us, one after the other, from Galicia. Enemies of Israel shed Jewish blood like water. Hundreds of Jewish victims have been murdered amid all sorts of atrocities, Countless innocents, men, women and children, our people’s most pious souls, have falleh. tn Lemberg alone 108, butchered and burned, were buried in one grave. Scores of scrolls of the law have been destroyed, and such outrages were committed as in the day of the destruction of the temple. All our brethren in Galicia are in deadly terror. “Our elders, therefore, have met and decided that the whole community—men, women and children —should assemble Tuesday at 8 o’clock, Arabic time, at the temple ruin to read the psalms and blow the shophar that the Lord above may take pity upon our brethren.” “Ibrahim! Ibrahim!” A shrill cry strikes the air. From the roof of her stone hut a swarthy Arab woman calls her son, who has somehow been caught in the walling, swaying multitude. “Ibrahim!” - At the Walling Place. The Jewish soldier rescues the reluctant Ibrahim just as a score of British Tommies appear in the wake of a Moslem guide. “Here you have the Jews’ walling wall,” he recites in a sing-song. “The upper stones were built in the time of the Romans, but the lower blocks belonged to Solomon's temple. Here the Jews come every Friday to wail.” “ The Mvish soldier has recognized a fellow Jew in an American Red Cross doctor, standing thoughtfully at the edge of the praying crowd. • “From what part of the States are you?’ he whispers eagerly. ‘Tm from Philly. I thought you might be, too.” Down the stony steps leading to the wailing place new figures are ever hurrying, scurrying. The Talmud Torah children are leaving with their rabbi. The weeping girl leans against the Arab hut now. her eyes half closed, her lips trembling. The oldyoung women still cling to the wall as if the God whose ear they seek were In Its very stones.

“A dole, a dole.” The beggar renews her quest. The sun sinks lower and lowfir, but still they come, old and young, the Jews of Jerusalem. The praying forms never weary. Ever their cry rings above the noise of the city, a centuries old cry.

Wailing Wall of the Jews.