The Last Exodus
337
The Exodus was over, the graveyard sealed. The Jew had no
reason, now, to return to the holy site of his antecedents. It
was as Allah—and the British Foreign Office—wished matters
to be.
LIBERATION
THE next day King Abdullah of Jordan, conquerer and new
master of the Old City, arrived. He visited the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre. I waited outside. He emerged—a neat, graying man of sixty-six, with a short, trimmed beard, deep-set
eyes and thick brows. He was dressed in a suit of army khaki,
which was probably borrowed, for it fitted him badly, his shirt
cuffs coming down to his fingertips. Anxious to get his picture, I called out:
"Will Your Majesty please stand still for a moment?"
While the king didn't know English, he understood, and
obligingly posed for a rare photo that I took as he stood in
front of the Holy Sepulchre surrounded by churchmen of the
Latin, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, and Syrian churches.
At that precise moment, I heard a rumble, then another,
louder. I had a hunch where it was coming from. I rushed to
the roof of the Armenian school. The sun shone radiantly
everywhere except on the Jewish quarter. Over it hung motionless a pall of ghastly purplish-gray haze, with fires still
raging here and there, and black smoke spiraling through.
Only one wall remained standing of the huge sextagonal
Hurvath Synagogue Beth Jacob, a landmark of the Old City,
whose foundation dated from about the twelfth century. I
saw the wall dimly through the dust pit that enveloped the
area. And now the seventh dynamite charge went off, and the
last wall of the ancient structure joined the others in the huge
burial mound that was now the Jewish quarter. The great
Nissim Back Synagogue had been destroyed earlier. The un-