Holy Temple Festival in Samaria
A first-of-its-kind all-night Holy Temple Festival will be held Saturday night in the Jewish town of Tapuach in Samaria (Shomron).

by Hillel Fendel, Arutz Sheva
July 31, 2009

Beit HaMikdash - Holy Temple
 

A first-of-its-kind all-night Holy Temple Festival will be held Saturday night in the Jewish town of Tapuach in Samaria (Shomron).

Beginning 10 PM and ending after morning prayers at sunrise, the motto of the festival will be, “Trust in G-d, not in Obama.” The participants will leave after the prayers for Jerusalem, traveling in a convoy via the youngest start-up neighborhoods in the Shomron and Binyamin. Once in Jerusalem, the participants will immerse in a mikveh (ritual bath) and ascend to the Halakhically-permitted (according to some rabbis) areas of the Temple Mount.

Among the participants will be Temple Movement leader Rabbi Yosef Elboim of the hareidi-religious sector, who has been a Temple Mount activist since the Six Day War, as well as MK Dr. Michael Ben-Ari and Shomron Regional Council head Gershon Mesika.

Musical entertainment will be provided by Dov Shurin, Sinai Tor, Aharon Raz’el, and more.

“During these days of intense pressure upon Israel to freeze all building and stifle all Jewish life in Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem," says organizer Moshe Kahn, an attendee of the original Woodstock event in 1969, "it’s only fitting to respond with an event that brings tens of thousands of proud Jews together to gather strength and encouragement from one another and prepare for the struggle ahead. Music alone has the strength to accomplish that.”

“We are not coming just for an extraordinary night of music and Torah lectures,” says Yekutiel Ben-Yaakov of Tapuach, another organizer, “but rather to show that the Temple Mount is where it all begins. We are a sovereign Jewish nation, free to live and build wherever we want in our land, and especially on Judaism’s holiest site in the world. We demand our basic civil rights on the Temple Mount, and we want our message to be heard in Washington and around the world: We have returned to the hills of Shomron for eternity, and the Land of Israel is not for sale.”

“Yes to the hilltops and the Temple Mount, no to Capitol Hill and Washington,” Ben-Yaakov concluded. “We want G-d to look down on us and see us fulfilling His trust in us.”