Israel has changed, but the memories of 1967 have not.
At least not if you served in that decisive war.
The politics have colored the intervening years. Was this war, imposed on Israel, the blessing that it seemed to be at the time?
What about Palestinian nationalism, not heard from before 1967?
And settlements?
Israel’s loss of underdog status?
It is not difficult to put the politics aside if you were in the war, because the results of the war utterly defied the expectations.
The Western Wall, in Jewish hands?
Not even the craziest dreamer imagined this when Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israel shipping in May, 1967. This strangling of Israel made war inevitable.
The biblical Land of Israel (1949 armistice lines obliterated), in Jewish hands?
The Sinai Peninsula, Israel’s?
Egypt’s entire air force, destroyed in the first hours of the war?
Israel’s colorless leader, Levi Eshkol, a war hero?
It is still impossible to absorb, all the more for someone who lived through the war as a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces.
One such person is Yossi Fried (who also fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War), a Denverite since 1975.
Yossi Fried, a graduate of both The Hebrew University and DU law schools, was inducted into the IDF in 1966.
He was part of a special program under which he received basic training, then a law school education, in return for five years of service to the IDF as an officer.
Fried was in law school in Jerusalem when the Six Day War broke out, and later an officer in the IDF’s Judge Advocate’s office, with the rank of captain.
Fried’s experiences during the Six Day War really begin with recollections of his father. The two are intricately connected because his father was a Holocaust survivor. That the son fought in a war to defend the Jewish people via an army that his father only wished his people had 30 years earlier is the link. It is saturated with poignance, pain and pride.
Fried’s father, Fried vividly recalls, was a Vizhnitzer chasid.
“Many of the Holocaust survivors were not anti-Israel, as is the perception is today.
“My father was very proud of me being a soldier in the army. To him, this manifested a complete turnaround from disaster to triumph, from Holocaust to the State of Israel.
“My father, who lost a wife and two children in the Holocaust, was an avid Zionist.
“On Yom Ha’atzma’ut (Israel Independence Day), he went to shul in his Shabbos clothes and recited Hallel, out of praise and gratitude. Many people in the shul did this.”
Fried’s father, who died in 1983, was in Auschwitz. “He had a number on his arm. I had a brother and sister whom, of course, I never met, two and four years old.
“He came from the Carpathian region of Rumania, a city named Borsa. It was very close to Sighet, in the center of the Vizhnitz-Satmar communities.
“My father went to yeshiva with the grandfather of all the current Vizhnitzer Rebbes — with the former rebbe, Chaim Meyer Chager, who died in 1972. The rebbe started Kiryat Vizhnitz in Bnei Brak after WW II.”
By the time the Six Day War broke out, Fried and his cohorts at The Hebrew University law school had only finished basic training.
About 10 to 15 days before war, his entire law school class was drafted.
“Since we had only finished basic training, they did not send us to the front. The whole class was sent to Sde Boker, where David Ben Gurion lived.
“The idea was to guard the kibbutz and a few of the surrounding areas in the event war would break out, since they needed the trained soldiers at the front.
“The atmosphere was very negative and tense. People were afraid. We did not know what to expect. We did not have computers or television. Our source of news was the small radio transistor and whatever our commanders told us.
“We listened to the transistor on the hour. The message was very confusing. The Arabs were broadcasting that they were uniting and about to attack. We thought: What’s going to happen?
“This was the era when they sent terrorists to attack kibbutzim and little remote villages and murder people.
“It was an atmosphere of fear, of what’s going to happen.
“I saw Ben Gurion on a daily basis. He lived in a small little house with two bodyguards and would walk about. Sde Boker was considered a possible target. We would worry we would be attacked.
“We talked to Paula Ben Gurion, his wife. She thanked us for being there.”
“On June 5, in the morning, when the war broke out, the Arab propaganda, the Arab radio, said that they had destroyed Tel Aviv and were attacking Jerusalem and all over Israel.
“We didn’t really know what was going on until Chaim Herzog, then a general in the army (later the president of Israel), came on later in the morning, as he was the official spokesman for the Army. It was during the Six Day War, in that position, that he became famous.
“In a sure, calming, reassuring voice, he broke the news that the Israel Air Force had destroyed the entire Egyptian Air Force in 90 minutes.
“It was beyond belief.
“We just couldn’t believe it.
“He kept talking throughout the day. News flashes. Very calm. Very steady.
“In between doing our duties we were glued to our little radio transistors.
“The whole atmosphere changed overnight from uncertainty and worry to elation — to feeling, this is amazing, this is unbelievable.
“The radio kept broadcasting interviews with commanders in the field. They would say, ‘We are in El Arish. We are in Ramat HaGolan. We are going forward.’
“On the third day of the war came the attack on the Old City after the Jordanians attacked Jerusalem. It’s hard to describe the feeling when Motta Gur, the commander of the paratroopers who actually entered the Old City, said, ‘Har ha-Bayit be-Yadeinu, The Temple Mount is in our hands.’
“They kept broadcasting that, again and again. It was an unbelievable feeling.”
“I lived in Jerusalem at the law school for one year before the war.
“Jerusalem was just a small city. The municipality was at the end of the city. Next to it was a wall. On top of that wall were Jordanian soldiers.
“If you wanted to call your parents, you had to place the call from the main post office in Jerusalem, on Jaffa Road. You would look up and see the Jordanian soldiers looking down at you.
“Go explain that to somebody today.
“The City of David, across from the present Mamilla Shopping Mall, was the worst, dilapidated neighborhood in Jerusalem, full of car repair shops. At the end of the street was the wall. And that was the end of Jerusalem.
“When I think back, it’s unbelievable, what a change! How the city changed, how it grew.
“How the feeling changed from before the war to during the war. I was on the kibbutz to guard the area, to patrol night and day. The work got easier and better by the day — following the initial shock that we were witnessing an event of historic proportions, of unparalled magnitude, something that no one in his wildest dreams could have imagined.”
“Within a week or so after the war, they released us back to school.
“Of course, half of the classes were not manned because some of the professors and students were still in the army.
“But I was able for the first time to get into the Old City. I don’t remember the exact date. It was within 10 or 12 days of the end of the war. The plaza in the front of the Kotel [Western Wall] was maybe one-third the size of what it is day.
“The first order of business was to expand that. There was no covered area to the left of the Kotel where you could daven.
“Tens of thousands of people kept pouring into the city every day.
“Initially, people did not walk through Jaffa Gate and the shuk, but through the Zion Gate.
“The first time I was at the Kotel was very special. Just unbelievable. Before the war, the only view I had of the Kotel was from climbing the balcony at King David’s grave. But you couldn’t really see much — [just the] highest two rows of the Wall. You couldn’t really get a feel.
“The Arab population of the Old City was very friendly and subdued.
“Completely different from the feeling today. There was no open hostility.
“I don’t know if this was because they were afraid, or they wanted to please the occupying power, but you walked with a sense of safety. You didn’t have to look behind your back and worry that someone would come out from a corner with a knife and try to stab you.
“It was elation. An unbelievable emotional outburst. The ability to daven at the Kotel for the first time!”
“A week later my father came to Jerusalem and I walked with him to the Kotel from my apartment in the Talbieh neighborhood of Jerusalem, on Hovevei Zion St.
“This was quite an experience. My father had been in Palestine in 1936 on a visit with the Vizhnitzer Rebbe and a few of his disciples. They spent six to eight months touring the country. My father remembered the old Kotel with the narrow passage in front of it — you remember the pictures from the times of the British Mandate?
“I cannot describe the emotional outburst when my father saw the Kotel for the first time. You’re talking about a Holocaust survivor, after all he went through.
“There was definitely a feeling of high, all over the country. Even haredim were walking around and shaking hands with the solders and flying Israeli flags and giving the soldiers food.
“We stopped in Arab stores. We bought things from them.
“The situation today — looking over your shoulder — definitely did not exist at that time.”
“From today’s perspective, as I look back:
“The Six Day War definitely changed Israel forever. It gave us the sense that we are here to stay, that Israel is not a temporary political creation that will go away. It gave us the sense that there was a power that protects us from Above; otherwise, there is no way to explain the Six Day War.
“But, I am also sad that all the good things we witnessed as a result of the Six Day War — not all the good lessons were applied. The unity we had during those times between religious and non-religious is not there any more. The political infighting was not there as it is today.
“We missed a historic opportunity by not knocking down a bigger part of the Old City.
“Moshe Dayan, for fear of not upsetting world powers and the Arab nations, decided to give control of Al Aksa Mosque to the Wakf, and limited the open area in front of the Kotel.
“If we had taken over the entire Old City, no one would have said a word.
“Having said the negative parts, there is no question that the Kotel continues to be a drawing point and a unifier for the entire people of Israel. You don’t have to be religious. You can come there any day of the week, any time, and see people from all segments of Israeli society and all walks of life, haredim in the black capotes and women in short-sleeves, standing and praying and kissing the Kotel.
“There is something special about being there, about how all the people of Israel unite when they come to the Kotel.
“To go there to pray on Hoshanah Rabbah at 5 a.m. and be with 50,000 people is a sight that remains in your mind forever. The experience is amazing.
“I remember the first Yom Ha-atzma’ut after the liberation of Jerusalem, in 1968. They held the military parade in front of the gates of the Old City. A few years later they cancelled the military parade. But that was a sight to be seen, the Israeli troop carriers and tanks and foot soldiers marching proudly, carrying the Israeli flag, in front of the gates of the Old City, with Israeli jets roaring above.
“An unbelievable feeling of pride and accomplishment.”