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Jerusalem's History in Vintage Pictures: Hanukkah Eve and a Maccabean Deliverance - December 11, 1917

(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Lenny Ben-David - During World War I, the Jews of Palestine suffered terribly from starvation, disease, and the Turkish army's looting, forced conscription, imprisonment, and execution. Then on December 11, 1917, the British army under General Edmund Allenby liberated Jerusalem. An official British military report on the Jerusalem victory likened the event to the defeat and ouster of the Seleucid Greeks by the Maccabees and attributed this quote to General Allenby: "On this same day, 2,082 years before, another race of conquerors, equally detested, were looking their last on the city which they could not hold, and inasmuch as the liberation of Jerusalem in 1917 will probably ameliorate the lot of the Jews more than that of any other community in Palestine, it was fitting that the flight of the Turks should have coincided with the national festival of Hanukkah, which commemorates the recapture of the Temple from the heathen Seleucids by Judas Maccabeus in 165 B.C."
2022-12-08 00:00:00
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