On the Temple Mount, Jewish fundamentalists are winning the day
Right-wing Jews visiting the Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem
Natasha Roth-Rowland writes in +972:
A few years ago, while conducting research on Jewish far-right movements, I toured the headquarters of the Temple Institute in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Most of the site is taken up by a museum dedicated to the Temple, the holiest site in Judaism; on display to visitors are priestly garments, ancient dyes, silver trumpets, vessels, and other ritual objects to be used in the “renewed Temple service,” all meticulously adhering to biblical specifications.
Operated as it is by a messianic group dedicated to building the Third Temple on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif — in place of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque — this museum is not an archive, but a blueprint. The institute is part of the Temple Mount Movement, which has poured decades of work into reconstituting the ritual objects and practices that were abandoned 2,000 years ago with the destruction of the Second Temple. This project has been lavishly supported by a procession of American-Jewish and, more recently, Christian-Zionist donors, along with Israeli government funding.
This past Sunday, Jerusalem Day, as the customary, government-sanctioned anti-Palestinian violence unfolded in the streets of the Old City and beyond, we witnessed the enactment of another aspect of this Temple project: the entrance of a record number of Jews — over 2,500 — to the Temple Mount, accompanied by the Kahanist MK Itamar Ben-Gvir. One viral photo showed a number of men lying prostrate on the ground, unencumbered by the police, performing a ritual action associated with Temple worship.