Forty Years

Sometime around 10:15 on the morning of June 7, 1967, the first reservist paratroopers of Brigade 55 broke through the Lion’s Gate leading into the Old City of Jerusalem and reached the narrow enclave of the Western Wall. Having just fought a fierce two-day battle in the streets of east Jerusalem, they grieved for lost friends, and grieved as well for their own lost innocence in what for many was their first experience of combat. They leaned against the Wall, some in exhaustion, some in prayer. Several wept, instinctively connecting to the Wall’s tradition of mourning the destruction of the Temple and the loss of Jewish sovereignty—precisely at the moment when Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem had been restored.

Yitzhak Yifat stands in front of the Western Wall moments after its capture on the morning of June 7, 1967

Several hours later, Yitzhak Yifat, a twenty-four-year-old reservist about to begin medical school, reached the Wall. As part of the brigade’s 66th Battalion, he and his friends had fought in the Six Day War’s toughest battle: Intimate combat against elite Jordanian Legionnaires in the trenches of Ammunition Hill, on the road to Mount Scopus. Something in their faces—perhaps a combination of exhaustion and uplift—caught the eye of a news photographer, David Rubinger.

Yifat is the centerpoint of the photograph, and not only because he is physically positioned there. Among his friends, only Yifat’s face is truly memorable; the faces around him seem to blur into his. Partly that is because he alone has removed his helmet, revealing the civilian beneath the soldier. Yifat also allows himself to appear vulnerable: While the men around him are tight-lipped, suppressing emotion, his mouth is open, as if trying to express the ineffable. For all of Rubinger’s staging, the emotions on Yifat’s face--grief, bewilderment, relief, awe, hope--could not have been coaxed or rehearsed.

Forty years later, the picture of the paratroopers at the Wall has become, arguably, the most beloved Jewish photographic image of our time—appearing in Passover Hagadas and on computer screen savers and posters in college dorm rooms. When Israel recently marked forty years to the Six Day War, the photograph at the Wall served as the media logo. Despite attempts to transform the picture into political parody and commercial kitsch—it has been co-opted for a protest poster by an artist opposed to the occupation, painted in rainbow colors by a gay group, and featured in a cigarette advertisement—its power to inspire hasn’t diminished.