100 Years since Hanukkah Miracle, Christmas Present of Jerusalem - CBN News Julie Stahl,Chris Mitchell

Celebrating 100 years after liberating Jerusalem, General Allenby at the Tower of David Museum ceremony. Photo, CBN News

100 Years since Hanukkah Miracle, Christmas Present of Jerusalem

12-15-2017

CBN News Julie Stahl,

Chris Mitchell

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JERUSALEM, Israel – A Hanukkah miracle and a Christmas present. That’s what Jews and Christians called the 1917 British conquest of Jerusalem.

Just a week after President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, thousands of Israelis and others gathered at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City and outside the nearby Tower of David Museum to mark the 100th anniversary of that historic day.

“Two weeks before Christmas and on the first day of Hanukkah the British Imperial Army entered Jerusalem under the command of General Edmund Allenby. A new chapter was beginning in the history of Jerusalem,” Israeli linguist and TV show host Avshalom Kor told the crowd.

The British conquest of Jerusalem was a turning point for the British forces and marked the end of 400 years of Ottoman Turkish rule.  It was also the first time in 700 years that Christians ruled the city.

The celebration on December 11, 2017 included a re-enactment of General Allenby’s famous entrance into the city on foot and a reading of his proclamation in multiple languages from the steps of what is now the Tower of David Museum.

Henry Allenby, who inherited General Allenby’s title of fourth Viscount of Megiddo, read Allenby’s proclamation in English on the steps where the general read it 100 years earlier to the day.

“Every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, customary place of prayer of whatsoever form of these three religions [Judaism, Christianity, Islam] will be maintained and protected according to the existing customs and beliefs to those whose faiths they are sacred,” Allenby read.

Jerusalem’s current mayor Nir Barkat praised Allenby.

“General Allenby, he was a great military man who conquered the land of Israel but in addition to his military strength, he was also a distinguished thinker and understood our city, Jerusalem, and its role in the world,” Barkat told the crowd. 

The anniversary celebration also welcomed a new exhibit at the Tower of David Museum, which includes the white flag of surrender and the keys to the city of Jerusalem handed over to the British.

“Today is 100 years since the entrance of General Allenby to Jaffa Gate on foot changing the world, changing Jerusalem,” said Eilat Lieber, director of the Tower of David. 

“It was a moment of hope for the people of Jerusalem who suffered so much from the war, from hunger. They waited for the change,” Lieber told CBN News.

“This wasn’t about demanding surrender of Jerusalem. That’s why he got off the horse,” Allenby told CBN News. “He wanted to show humility. He wanted to show a respect for the inhabitants of this city. He wanted to show respect for the three great faiths of this city.” 

Allenby, who was visiting Jerusalem for the first time, said he had been “massively welcomed” to the city. “It’s just been a whirlwind of a mind-blowing experience.”

The great grandson of Maj-Gen. John Shea, who accepted the surrender of the Turks in 1917, also joined the celebration.

“We’ve always known about the story of Jimmy of Jerusalem, as my great grandfather was known by his troops,” John Benson told CBN News.  “But to be here on the 100th anniversary of the surrender and Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem is very proud making and also very humbling.”

An important aspect of the victory was Allenby’s faith.

“General Allenby was a devout believer in Yeshua and he knew his scriptures extremely well, including the prophecies of Jerusalem and when the Lord gave him the prophecy of Isaiah 31:5,” said Ken Thomson from Canada, whose grandfather helped conquer the city under Allenby.

The scripture in Isaiah 31:5 says, “Like birds flying about, so will the Lord of Hosts defend Jerusalem. Defending, He will also deliver it; passing over, He will preserve it.”  

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“And he was given the idea of using airplanes flying over and dropping leaflets that said leave the city now,” Thomson told CBN News.  “And that’s why he was able to take it out without destruction as the prophecy said.  Without firing one gunshot, he walked into the city.” 

Thomson said he was touched by the fact that Allenby was a believer and knew the scriptures. “And my grandfather got to be there, was there with that, was part of history.”

At the end of the ceremony on Monday, the actor playing General Allenby said it was time to return something he had received at the surrender of the city 100 years earlier.

“A hundred years ago, I stood here and I received the key to this wonderful city and I think that a hundred years later it’s about time that I return it,”  ‘General Allenby’ said.

“So, it’s a little bit rusty but keep it, watch it, it’s the only copy so you can lock [the city] in the evening time. Thank you so much Mr. Mayor,” he said.

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Israel's History - a Picture a Day (Beta) - The Holy Land Revealed

British General Edmund Allenby enters Jerusalem on December 11, 1917. Only days earlier, the city was still under the administration of the Ottoman empire, a 400-year-long occupation. Library of Congress.

Israel's History - a Picture a Day (Beta) - The Holy Land Revealed

Aug. 4, 2017

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Jerusalem’s unification in the Six-Day War. It also marks the 100th anniversary of a fierce World War I battle that saved the city from destruction.

A version of this article appeared in Mosaic, May 22, 2017

Posted: 04 Aug 2017

On Yom Yerushalayim [Jerusalem Day], which took place on May 24, 2017, Israel celebrated the 50th anniversary of Jerusalem’s unification in June 1967. Marking the climax of a swift defensive victory over the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, the battle for the Holy City resulted in dramatically altering its political, religious, and geographic status.

But this year also marks another anniversary: the centenary of a fierce World War I battle that not only saved Jerusalem from physical destruction but rescued its entire Jewish population from squalor, starvation, plague, exile, and death. In the scope of Jewish history, the liberation of Jerusalem in December 1917 ranks with the salvation holidays of Hanukkah and Purim.

Origins

Early in World War I, with the encouragement of its German allies, the Ottoman army in Palestine began preparations to attack British positions along Egypt’s Suez Canal, a critical artery linking Great Britain to its colonies in the east. The attack took place in January 1915.



Turkish troops passing through the Jaffa Gate, 1914. From the author’s collection, Ottoman Imperial Archives. Click all images to enlarge.

To bolster their forces, the Turks declared universal conscription in Palestine, a territory that had been under Ottoman control since the late 15th century. Supplies, livestock, and equipment were plundered from the local population. A letter to an American supporter from the American Colony, a community of Christians in Jerusalem, summed up the situation in the city and the country at large:

[The Turkish] government commandeering not only animals but every requirement of life, the wholesale drafting of the manpower, and the dearth of business, since being entirely cut off from communication with the outside world—all of these things [have] brought people to an unbelievable state of poverty.

Jews, who already then constituted a majority in modern Jerusalem, were especially hard hit as Jewish men were rounded up and sent to the front lines. On August 31, 1914, the American ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, sent an urgent telegram to the New York Jewish tycoon Jacob Schiff. “Palestinian Jews facing terrible crisis,” he wrote. “Fifty-thousand dollars . . . needed [to] support families whose breadwinners have entered army.”



Caption reads: “Reservists and recruits rounded up in Palestine by the Turks being marched unwillingly to barracks. Troops of the Turkish Regular Army marching newly-raised levies through Jerusalem to camp in readiness for their projected attack on Egypt.” From the author’s collection, Ottoman Imperial Archives.
Nature Takes a Hand

Matters turned even worse when, starting in March 1915, huge swarms of locusts struck Syria and Palestine, devastating the countryside, devouring everything in sight, and spreading disease and starvation on a massive scale. “The locust invasion started seven days ago and covered the sky,” wrote the Muslim Jerusalemite Ihsan Hasan al-Turjman in his diary on March 29, 1915. “Today it took the locust clouds two hours to pass over the city. God protect us from the three plagues—war, locusts, and disease—for they are spreading through the country. Pity the poor.”

In the words of John Whiting, an American Colony member who chronicled the locust cycle in a series of photographs, “The locusts were so voracious and numerous that they could swarm over an unguarded infant and devour its eyes within a few minutes.” For his part, the Zionist activist Alexander Aaronsohn reported seeing “Arab babies, left by their mothers in the shade of some tree, whose faces had been devoured by the oncoming swarms of locusts before their screams had been heard.”


A tree before the locusts struck. Library of Congress.


The same tree minutes later after the locusts hit. Library of Congress.

Between late 1915 and late 1916, according to one analyst, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people in Palestine died “from starvation or starvation-related diseases” caused by the locust invasion. In Jerusalem, some Jewish women, desperate for food and care for their children, and not knowing the fate of their husbands, turned to prostitution and, as one historian has written, “went to the wrong with German and Turkish troops.”

The Turks Bear Down

Across Palestine, the Turks ruled with cruelty and rapaciousness. All suffered, but especially Jews and Armenian Christians. Since Russia was part of the alliance ranged against Germany and the Ottoman empire, Jews of Russian origin were viewed as a potential fifth column. In December 1914, the Turks expelled 6,000 of them from Jaffa. (Thanks to the U.S. Navy, they were safely evacuated to Alexandria.) In April 1917, another 8,000-10,000 Jews would be expelled from Jaffa and Tel Aviv.


Expelled Jews arriving in Alexandria, Egypt, in late 1914 or early 1915 on the USS Tennessee. Department of the Navy, Naval Historical Center.


Ḥemdah Ben-Yehudah, a journalist and the wife of the pioneering Hebrew scholar Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, provided further details in her lengthy contribution to Jerusalem: Its Redemption and Future, a 1918 volume of eyewitness essays:

The [Turkish] military commander Hassan Bey knew no limits to . . . wickedness. The [Turks] began by a systematic persecution of the Jews. They arrested the Hebrews; cross-questioned them; accused them of concealing arms, of evading military service, of belonging to secret societies, and of working in opposition to the government. After being cast into prison, they were spit upon, beaten, deprived of their watches and money, fined heavily, and then released! . . .

[O]n pretext of military necessity the government took possession of the remaining supplies in the city and occupied public buildings that belonged to enemy countries [i.e., Britain, France, and Russia], the hospitals, orphanages, schools, convents, and monasteries. 

Ten-thousand Jews left Jerusalem in one week. The streets were filled with the exiles who had no carriages and conveyed their baggage on their own backs. 

Most of the houses were closed because the inhabitants were dead, or deported, exiled, or in prison. Deserted were the streets. One dreaded to be seen outdoors for fear of falling victim to the rage of the Turks. The women kept house underground; but there was little food to prepare. They had forgotten the appearance of a loaf of bread. The babies died for lack of milk. 

Fervent prayers were rudely interrupted by the intrusion of Turkish soldiers [who] entered and penetrated down to the cellars and arrested the defenseless Hebrews. They tore the husbands from the arms of their wives, and separated the children from their parents. . . . The wives and the young women threw themselves upon the necks of their husbands and fathers and brothers, insisting that they should share the horrors of this terrible forced journey. The victims were taken away in the direction of Jericho.

The Tide Starts to Turn

By summer 1917, the city of Jerusalem and its Jewish residents were nearly eradicated. Some 2,700 orphans wandered the streets. The weakened population fell victim to cholera, tuberculosis, and typhoid.

A harassed Jewish beggar in Jerusalem. The photo, taken by a German officer, bore the caption: “a typical merchant in a Jerusalem street market, 1917.” Imperial War Museum, Q 86351.


Original caption: “Hangings outside Jaffa Gate, Jerusalem: Arabs, Armenians, Bedouins, Jews.” Official Turkish photo circa 1917. File number FL1533796. State Library, New South Wales, Australia.

But by now the Turks were coming under increasing pressure from the British expeditionary force led by General Edmund Allenby. Having repulsed the attempted Ottoman invasion of Egypt, Allenby was moving northward to Gaza and posing an incipient threat to the Turkish grip on Jerusalem.

“Scorched earth” is an apt description of some of the Turkish-British battle sites in Palestine, as can be seen in images of the devastation following the fierce fighting in Gaza in the spring of 1917:


Gaza after the two battles in March and April 1917. Library of Congress.

After capturing Be’er Sheva in October, the British forces, supplemented by fighters from Australia and New Zealand (known as ANZACs), turned toward Jerusalem.

The prominent hilltop of Nebi Samuel (tomb of the Prophet Samuel, which had been converted into a mosque), just three miles north of Jerusalem, was the scene of a November battle between three British and three Turkish divisions. Ḥemdah Ben-Yehudah describes hearing, even from her cellar hiding-place, “the roar of Turkish cannon . . . against the Nebi Samuel where the English had fortified themselves.” It, too, was reduced to ruins:


Nebi Samuel before the battle. Library of Congress.

Nebi Samuel after the battle. Library of Congress.

The Redemption of Jerusalem Begins

A Turkish scholar describes what happened next, after the Turks appealed to their German allies for help in defending Jerusalem:

The German General Erich von Falkenhayn did not send reinforcements to Jerusalem because he did not want the relics and the holy places damaged because of severe fighting. . . . Dissatisfaction with the advice and command of General Falkenhayn was growing. His inability had resulted in the loss of the Gaza-Beersheba line. His refusal to send reinforcements would now result in the loss of Jerusalem. . . .In fact, Falkenhayn, the commander of the Turkish and German armies in Palestine, not only refused to send reinforcements but ordered the retreat of Turkish soldiers so that Jerusalem would not be destroyed. From her own vantage point, here is how Ḥemdah Ben-Yehudah saw it:

The English were making a movement whose object was to encircle Jerusalem. The Turks and Germans commanded that the city should be defended and they sent for reinforcements from Damascus. . . . When the reinforcements failed to arrive, the Turks perceived that they would be obliged to evacuate. In great haste, they arrested everyone whom they caught on the streets. . . . For the last time on leaving, the hated Turkish soldiers had entered the houses to rob and to spoil, and to carry off everything they could lay hands on.

The formal surrender of Jerusalem. Handwritten caption: “The Mayor of Jerusalem Hussein Effendi El Husseini meeting with Sergeants Sedwick and Hurcomb [of the] London Regiment under the White Flag of Surrender, December 9, 2017.”

From Despair to Deliverance

In late November 1917, the Jewish women, children, and elderly men were still huddled underground, all too despairingly aware, as Ḥemdah Ben-Yehudah writes, that soon it would be Hanukkah: “the Feast of Deliverance in former days, and now approaching as the day of destruction!”

The women, weeping, prepared the oil for the sacred lights, and even the men wept, saying that this would be the last time they should keep the feast in Jerusalem! They strained their ears to hear the horses’ hoofs and the tread of the [Turkish] soldiers coming to arrest them and drive them forth. The women pressed their children to their breasts crying: “They are coming to take us!” 

Then, suddenly, other women came rushing from outside down into the depths, crying: “Hosanna! Hosanna! The English! The English have arrived!” Weeping and shouting for joy, Jews and Christians, trembling and stumbling over one another, emerged and rushed forth from the caverns and holes and underground passages. Pious Jews uttered thanksgivings to the Lord God of Hosts who had wrought deliverance in this great historic day, in the very hour of the beginning of Hanukkah, the Feast of the Miracle of Lights. 

On the first day of Hanukkah [November 27], the [advance] troop of English conquerors entered, shared their own bread with the famished populace, and offered the support of their hands to the feeble and the aged. On the following day, when the great English army entered the city, the women threw themselves on the necks of the soldiers, calling for the benediction of heaven upon them. Young women kissed the hems of their garments, and children threw flowers on their path.

* * * * *It was an impulse of life after the reign of death. The first to obey this overwhelming impulse were Jewish youths, the remnant that had been concealed hidden like the seed in the earth and had thus escaped the general persecution. These young men demanded the privilege of fighting side by side with the English, in the conquest of their own country. Their desire was granted. A battalion of native Jews was immediately enlisted, and the [numbers of] recruits increased.Fighting continued for more than a week afterward, but by December 9, 1917, the mayor of Jerusalem formally surrendered, and two days later General Allenby entered the Holy City on foot.



Jewish recruits for the 40th (Palestine) Battalion, Royal Fusiliers in Jerusalem, summer 1918. Imperial War Museum Q 12670.

One Year Later

In November 1918, the Ashkenazi City Council, a precursor of today’s Eydah Ḥaredit, posted a notice of ceremonies marking the first Jerusalem Liberation Day in all synagogues and study halls and expressing thanks to the government of Britain:


Screen grab taken by the author from a vintage newsreel.
In honor of Liberation DayFrom the Ashkenazi City Council in the holy city of Jerusalem, may it be rebuilt soon, Amen.

The Council calls upon our brethren in the congregations of God’s people to honor Thursday, the 24th day of Kislev, the first anniversary of the capture of Holy Jerusalem by the government of Britain. On this honored day, all synagogues and study halls should thank the Lord for His redemption and salvation and, after the Torah reading, recite the prayer “Who givest salvation” for the king of Great Britain [after Psalm 144: “Who givest salvation unto kings, who rescuest David Thy servant from the hurtful sword”].

An official British military report on the Jerusalem victory, likening the 1917 liberation to the defeat and ouster of the Seleucid Greeks by the Maccabees, and attributed by some to General Allenby himself, appears in several sources:

On this same day, 2,082 years before, another race of conquerors, equally detested, were looking their last on the city which they could not hold, and inasmuch as the liberation of Jerusalem in 1917 will probably ameliorate the lot of the Jews more than that of any other community in Palestine, it was fitting that the flight of the Turks should have coincided with the national festival of the Hanukkah, which commemorates the recapture of the Temple from the heathen Seleucids by Judas Maccabæus in 165 B.C.Tragically, such British concern for the Jewish people did not last. 

Two decades later, in the mid-1930s, the British Mandate government shut the gates of Palestine to European Jews desperate to escape Nazi Germany. But by 1948, with the establishment of Israel, and by 1967, with the victories in the Six-Day War, the Jewish people was firmly on the path of national redemption.

Battle for Britain’s Soul - Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

Battle for Britain’s Soul

Wednesday, June 07, 2017 |  Charles Gardner  ISRAEL TODAY

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Christians

News of yet another terrorist attack will have had a numbing effect on many of us. The fact that seven died at London Bridge, and that it once again brought back memories of the 7/7 horror of 2005 when my brother was among the severely injured, only added to feelings of despair and sadness just as a concert was being held in Manchester in memory of the 22 who died there less than a fortnight earlier.

But we have lost God’s protective cover because we have stopped serving him; we have said we don’t want him or his laws; and this has made us particularly vulnerable to attack.

Many Christians will identify with the feelings of the prophet Elijah who, after winning a great contest with the idolatrous false prophets on Mt Carmel, realised that he had still not yet convinced Israel’s leaders of their need to turn back to the Lord.

Queen Jezebel was furious at the undeniable display of God’s miraculous power and authority, and was determined to kill his prophet before a day was out. Weary of battle and exhausted from his tireless exploits, Elijah succumbed to a severe bout of depression and ran away.

“I have had enough, Lord,” he said, praying that he would die. What more could he do to bring Israel back to God?

Many British Christians are understandably frustrated and weary. We have been warning our leaders for so long about the Islamic threat along with the dangers of discarding God’s laws. But, as in the days of Jeremiah, their response is to declare ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace: or tell us that the new morality is good for us because it satisfies our need for ‘diversity and equality’. Of course, if you throw God out of the equation, who’s to judge what is right and wrong?

But at last it seems, in the UK, as if the country has had enough too, judging by the tone of Prime Minister Theresa May, saying “enough is enough”, indicating her intent on introducing much tougher measures against terrorism, while Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn said he was sick of politicians pussyfooting around with platitudes. We are engaged in a war that has everything to do with Islam, he writes, citing the chilling statement by one of Saturday night’s attackers, “This is for Allah!”

Scorning the tired mantra that says such atrocities are “nothing to do with Islam”, he even challenged Mrs May’s reference to it being a ‘perversion of Islam’.

“Does she think the Saudi predilection for chopping off heads, or the popular Pakistani sport of stoning to death women accused of adultery are perversions of the religion of peace, too?”

He adds that “it is incontestable that the terrorists are all Muslims who quote the Koran to justify their deranged war against those they consider to be filthy ‘infidels’.” And he says “the political class must shoulder the blame for allowing murderous Islamism to establish deep roots in Britain…”

“Rather than address the root causes of terror, the politicians are content to send the police into the front line – a task to which they rose with exemplary bravery on Saturday night.”

Declaring that we were engaged in a war of attrition which the terrorists were winning, he challenged the politicians to face up to the enemy within.

It’s taken journalists like Richard – Melanie Phillips is another – to call our leaders to account. The church should take note, and rise up as one in challenging the decadent culture we have lamely come to accept in our midst.

Could this be the turning of the tide? Yet the liberal left, at every turn, try their utmost to intimidate those who speak the truth – especially Christians or their allies. And as in the days of Elijah, there is a Jezebel spirit across the land manifested most obviously through the LGBT+ movement which has managed to penetrate every crack and crevice of our government and precious institutions. Even the church, for the most part, has been intimidated into silence in speaking out on sexual ethics for fear of being seen as ‘homophobic’.

Elijah ran away and wanted to die, but God refreshed him instead – with food and sleep, and then with his “still, small voice” that spoke above the earthquake, wind and fire. Further, he was told to anoint his successor, Elisha, to continue the heavenly mission, and was then reminded that there were 7,000 who had not bowed the knee to Baal (the false god).

The remnant of true believers in Britain need to keep their nerve, hold steady and be encouraged. This is no time to run away or give up. Seek God’s refreshing from on high; his limitless power is available as we carry out the gospel mission which alone will turn the tide of evil. There are people all over the country – Muslims included – who are hungry for the truth that will set them free.

The latest London attack took place just 90 minutes before Britons traditionally celebrate the Day of Pentecost – the empowering of the church 2,000 years ago when the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples who were thus endued with “power from on high” (in the words of Jesus) to boldly preach the gospel to the ends of the earth.

Yet the focus at this tragic time in England was on a pop concert when what we really need is another Pentecost. Elijah’s great victory on Mt Carmel was a precursor to Pentecost. He challenged his rivals that the God who answered by fire would be the true God! The false prophets frantically called on their god for hours, and there was no response. But the God of Elijah answered by fire, which burnt up the sacrifice even though it had been covered with large amounts of water. (1 Kings 18.16-46) Do it again, Lord! Send the fire!

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Charles Gardner is author of Israel the Chosen, available from Amazon, and Peace in Jerusalem, available from olivepresspublisher.com

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