B"H, I Ascended Har HaBayit, The Temple Mount! #1, Anti-Jewish Discrimination, Forced to Wait

This will be the first of at least two posts about my experience ascending Har HaBayit.

Here's a picture of some of the group I was with, yes, right there on Har HaBayit, where our two Holy Temples stood in Biblical times. Yes, I was really there!

The good news is that my friends and I were permitted to ascend the Temple Mount today. The bad news is that we were forced to wait while non-Jewish tourists went up without any delays.

We handed in our Identity Cards for inspection and had to also let the security staff check everything we had with us, from money to camera, phones to pens. They didn't return our ID's for quite a while. I was afraid that they'd be holing them the entire time we'd be up there. But they gave them back when we had permission to enter.

Those on the left are the tourists who could just go in, while my friends and I spent close to an hour trying to keep out of the sun and looking for a place to sit.

As the morning got later, the sun got stronger, and we still had to wait.

In the meantime, tourists from all over the world went up without any delays, just simple security checks. At least it wasn't as bad as the previous time I had attempted to enter. Then the gate was closed completely. Today we just had to be patient and polite, because the police guards were too quick to take offense and threaten banishment. Also when I tried a couple of months ago, we checked out other gates, even though they are only open to Arabs, and the Arabs don't get any security check. They can bring and do bring weapons up there.

About a month they took over and burnt the police station on The Temple Mount.

It's black from the fires the Arabs lit at the police station.

But it's davka Jews who are searched and restricted.

At least today we were allowed up. More about this to follow.