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YOM YERUSHALAYIM
- JERUSALEM OF GOLD
“THE SONG THAT TOOK THE CITY OF JERUSALEM”
by Linda Gottlieb
In Tel Aviv, Naomi Shemer sits and thinks about her latest creation. For her, it was a miracle which began on May 15, 1967. Some 3,500 people had crowded into Nation Hall (Binyanei Ha’Uma) in modern Jerusalem to attend the annual song festival on Yom Ha'atzmaut.
For two months before the song festival, she wrote nothing at all. But as she went about her daily activities, she thought about the Jerusalem she had known as a girl.
She remembered the colours, the sounds, the silent mood of Jerusalem, and her childhood visits to ancient places from biblical times, closed to her forever since 1948. She thought, too, of a story from the Talmud in which the wife of the great Rabbi Akiva lived in poverty for years so that her husband might study. When Rabbi Akiva became a famous and learned man, he rewarded his wife with a ‘”Jerusalem of Gold,” a gold brooch hammered out in the shape of the ancient city.
Naomi Shemer took these words, “Yerushalayim shel Zahav” – “Jerusalem Made of Gold” – and used it as the title for her song.
For the first time in a modern song, she spoke about the “Ancient Wall” which Jerusalem “Carries Around Her Heart,” and talked of the sights of the Old City, sights Jews of today would never see:
“The water cisterns are dry,
The Marketplace is empty
We cannot visit our Temple in the ancient city.”
At Nation Hall in Jerusalem, it was already close to midnight when the song was sung. Fourteen other songs had already been performed. The audience applauded. Then a young girl, discovered by the composer herself only a few days before and unknown to the audience, walked out on stage her only accompaniment was her guitar. As she sang “Yerushalayim shel Zahav,” the audience grew hushed.
When the girl finished, there was a second of silence,
then ear-splitting applause for nearly seven minutes. Naomi Shemer’s sadness about losing the Old City, it turned out, was every Israeli’s.
“Jerusalem of Gold” had to be played once more, by popular demand. This time – the second time the song had ever been performed – the entire audience joined in the chorus.
On the same night that the Jewish audience was singing of a Jerusalem they would never see, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt was moving his troops into the Sinai, close to Israel’s borders.
Then the telephone calls and letters began. Soldiers wrote to tell Naomi Shemer how they sang her song in the fields during the evening. Performers called to ask if they might begin and end their programs for the military with her song, since the soldiers inevitably requested it. A high member of the armed forces called to invite Miss Shemer to sing her song for the troops stationed around Jerusalem. Although she does not often perform, she accepted.
On the day after the war began, she joined some of the troops, singing for them in the evening.
A few evenings later, someone had a transistor radio. Suddenly an announcer broke into the music. “The City of Jerusalem Has Been Taken!” The program switched to Jerusalem itself. Gunfire could be heard behind the announcer’s voice, as he described the paratroopers’ block-by-block fight into the heart of the Old City. Now some of the troops were advancing toward the Western Wall, he said.
Then, in the background, softly at first, there was the sound of a song sun by what sounded like hundreds of men, in hoarse voices, gasping for breath between lines. “Yerushalayim shel Zahav, veshel nehoshet veshel or, Halo lechol shiraih ani kinor.” (”Jerusalem of gold, of copper and of light, let me be a violin for all your songs!”)
Naomi Shemer, crouched by side of an Egyptian wall, listened to the broadcast. She heard the announcer’s description of the tanks and trucks coming into the city, many of them plastered with banners reading, “Yerushalayim shel Zahav.” Tears ran down her cheeks…
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