Ashkenaz or Sephard, religious or secular, liberal or conservative the Jewish people are not a monolithic group and yet we are one.
In these days of wonder and doubt regarding the justice of our cause, in a time of factionalism and social schisms, in times of international isolation, there is nothing like the fighters section of the cemetery to relate how deep our roots are in this land.
In this section are buried religious and secular, yeshiva and university graduates. Young people that fell while defending the Jewish Quarter on the day of the establishment of the State are buried alongside students of the Gra who immigrated to Jerusalem, alongside victims of the 1929 massacre and alongside admorim from Poland, alongside Shai Agnon and Menachem Begin, near the burial spot of Rabbi Saadia MiSklov and the Maiden of Ludmir, Generations of Jews, too many to count.
He whose feet did not walk among these graves will not understand what is Jerusalem, will not understand what is Zionism, will not understand what is independence. He will not know how deep our roots are, how Jerusalem is planted deep in our hearts.
We did not return to this mountain in order to eventually leave it. We returned to jerusalem in order to live in it, to build it, to be built by it. With that we can be comforted, by Jerusalem that has been reestablished and has become a metropolis, in Jerusalem that has become a symbol of our freedom and strength, in jerusalem in which boys and girls are playing in its streets...
In this section are buried religious and secular, yeshiva and university graduates. Young people that fell while defending the Jewish Quarter on the day of the establishment of the State are buried alongside students of the Gra who immigrated to Jerusalem, alongside victims of the 1929 massacre and alongside admorim from Poland, alongside Shai Agnon and Menachem Begin, near the burial spot of Rabbi Saadia MiSklov and the Maiden of Ludmir, Generations of Jews, too many to count.
He whose feet did not walk among these graves will not understand what is Jerusalem, will not understand what is Zionism, will not understand what is independence. He will not know how deep our roots are, how Jerusalem is planted deep in our hearts.
We did not return to this mountain in order to eventually leave it. We returned to jerusalem in order to live in it, to build it, to be built by it. With that we can be comforted, by Jerusalem that has been reestablished and has become a metropolis, in Jerusalem that has become a symbol of our freedom and strength, in jerusalem in which boys and girls are playing in its streets...
Speaker Of the Knesset Ruby Rivlin,at a memorial ceremony on Har HaZeisim for the fallen soldiers from the Old City of Jerusalem
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