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bwas killed. Five dead Jews and forty injured ones were brought bto the hospital, the victims of Arab demands for an end, not to bJewish “occupation,” but the Jewish existence in the land per bse. The Pogroms of 1929 bOn Yom Kippur in the year 5689 (1928), the Arabs of Eretz bYisrael discovered the Wailing (Western) Wall. More precisely, bthey discovered that the one remnant of the Holy Temple of the bJews was really a Muslim holy place. For hundreds of years, bJews had come freely to the symbol of their exile and suffering, bto shed bitter tears and to plead with the Almighty to redeem bthem from the four corners of the earth. But on Yom Kippur, b5689, a British policeman barged into the midst of the wor- bshipers to forcibly remove the partition that separated the men band women, and thus he put into motion the forces of pogrom. bFor years the British had claimed that they would keep the b“status quo” for religious sites in Jerusalem. The Wall had no bstanding as a Muslim religious site at all, but the Muslims did bnot wish to see it granted Jewish religious status. The British bviewed the partition between the sexes at the Yom Kippur ser- bvices as an attempt to convert the Wall into a “synagogue.” bThe incident gave birth to Jewish indignation and to an bArab myth. The Mufti of Jerusalem at the time, the supreme bMuslim leader, carved a historic niche for himself as a treach- berous and murderous individual (he later spent the years of bWorld War II in Berlin calling upon Muslims to join in a holy bwar on behalf of Adolf Hitler). His name was Haj Amin Al- bHusseini (a member of a Jerusalem family of “notables”), and bin 1929, in his position as Muslim theologian, he decreed that bthe Wall was in reality a Muslim holy place. The reason? When bMuhammad allegedly went up to heaven from Jerusalem on his bwondrous horse, Al-Burak, he chose a spot near the Wall to btether it. This wondrous tale of a wondrous horse had, of course, bnot prevented Muslims, for centuries, from wondrously riding bthrough the area on horses and donkeys who left their un- bmistakably wondrous presence behind, on the ground. But no bmatter. A political-religious legend was born, and for almost a byear the Arabs incited, lied, and heated the atmosphere that led bto the deadly pogroms of 1929.
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