Thursday, February 09, 2017

The Temple, An Edifice

Is calling for the rebuilding of the Temple "extremist"? "Outrageous"?

Well, consider this:

in the spring of 1921 in London. Sir Alfred Mond, then Minister of Health in the British Cabinet (and as one of London's wealthiest Jews, a source of funding for many of the Zionists' large-scale capital projects in Palestine) addressed the Palestine Foundation Fund with an appeal for a new "edifice" to be erected "where Solomon's ancient temple once stood." The speech was reported in the Daily Telegraph and was reiterated in a Parliamentary note. With the help of his official friends, Under-Secretary of State William Ormsby-Gore and High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, Mond's reference to the temple site was later dismissed as "figurative" speech. [17]

17 - 7 CO 733/2; CO 733/4; Hansard reference for April 5, 1921 [I couldn't find that*], Shaw Commission, Minutes of Evidence, op. cit., p. 919.
*

What I did find was this from 1927 regarding a bill regulating strikes and industrial actions:

This new Clause has been put down with the desire to lay, even at this moment, the foundation of an edifice—a temple for a league of industrial peace which is unfortunately more important to the future welfare of this country than the League of Nations is to the world.


^

1 comment:

Shlomo Goren said...

I wonder if this has any relation to the Rabbinate's edict about anybody going on to the Mount. I once heard Prof. Yoel Elitzur postulate that it was due to an initiative of some Jews, notably Achad Ha'am, to erect some kind of edifice on the site of the Temple, meant as an international cultural beacon of some sort.