Dear friends:

May 16, 2007, or Iyyar 28 on the Jewish calendar, is Jerusalem Day, celebrating the Jews' June 7, 1967 (modern Gregorian calendar) conquest of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount for the first time since Rome destroyed the temple in AD 70, 1,897 years earlier.

What you are now about to hear is perhaps one of the most riveting recordings in the modern-day history of Israel.  I refer to the dramatic sounds of Israeli Defense Forces entering and liberating Jerusalem's Old City and the Western Wall on June 7th, 1967.  You hear the sounds of gunfire.  You hear the footsteps of Israeli soldiers, as they draw closer and closer and as General Uzi Narkiss instructs them and asks to be shown where the Western Wall stands.  We hear a triumphant Brigadier General Shlomo Goren, later to become the Chief Rabbi of Israel, as he recites the memorial prayer and sounds the shofar, as Israeli soldiers weep with sorrow over their comrades killed in combat.  

Click here: IsraCast: Liberation of the Temple Mount and Western Wall or go to http://www.isracast.com/Articles/Article.aspx?ID=374

Colonel Motta Gur announces on the army wireless: "The Temple Mount is in our hands! I repeat, the Temple Mount is in our hands! All forces, stop firing! This is the David Operations Room. All forces, stop firing! I repeat, all forces, stop firing! Over."

The audio is in Hebrew but a partial English translation is contained at the above links.

This is celebrated each year but what makes this year special is that it is the 40th anniversary of that historic event.  That this is the 40th anniversary seems prophetically significant.  All history hinges on Israel, called "God's time clock" by scholars, and 40 is a significant biblical number.  We do not know what it might mean, but at the least it is probably some kind of marker or indicator of approximately where we may be in God's plan for the ages.

Jim