All Her Sons: Politics and Gender in the Jewish Cult at Rachel’s Tomb of the Last Three Decades

ABSTRACT

The following paper explores the evolution of the cult of Rachel the Matriarch and its main folktales from the 1990’s until the present day. Whilst folktales surrounding the Biblical matriarch date back to the Rabbinic era, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards a unique Jewish cult at Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem significantly intensified. These rites, which were mostly female-led, were analyzed in a series of previous studies, most of which traced their development from their inception up to the 1990s. Since the Oslo Accords, however, the rituals and rites along with the folktales have evolved in profound ways. My research demonstrates the degree to which the political sphere impacts modern day Israeli-Jewish folk traditions, including bringing about the establishment of new traditions. Specifically, I argue that the rites, in the past mostly female-led, due to the increasing political significance of the cult, have undergone an intense process of masculinization.

KEYWORDS:

• Rachel the matriarch
• folklore
• folktales
• sacred space
• politics and religion
• Oslo Accord
• Israel/Palestine

On the evening of 29 January 2019, the hot-water urn in the coffee corner of the men’s section at the Rachel’s Tomb compound in Bethlehem malfunctioned.¹ The worshipers and yeshiva students asked the maintenance staff to bring a replacement from the storeroom, which holds dozens of items that are donated to the site each year. The next day, a 50-second video was filmed and promptly shared on the Facebook page of the Rachel’s Tomb Institutions² under the title, “A Story of Wondrous Divine Providence at the Tomb of the Matriarch Rachel.” It shows the coffee corner and the urn, as a voiceover relates that the appliance had malfunctioned and been replaced. The dedication plaque on the new urn reported that it had been donated to the compound in memory of the late Mrs. Bina Greenwald, who had passed away without children to pray for her. So, continued the inscription, when people recite the blessing over a beverage made using water from the urn, they are requested to channel especially strong devotion and to dedicate the blessing to the ascent of the woman’s soul. Astoundingly, explained the narrator, the old urn had malfunctioned precisely on the sixth anniversary of Mrs. Greenwald’s death, so it was on that very day that the many men who used the urn made the blessing with special devotion to honor her. The video concludes with the words, “Our Mother Rachel takes care of her children.”

Although it may not have been intended by the photographer and those who distributed the video, this is one of the more profound manifestations of a process of crucial transformation in the Jewish cult of the Biblical matriarch; one spanning over three decades, and which ushers in a new stage with regard to its character and the individuals who lead it. The present article examines this transformation and its expression in folktales, primarily those that circulate via the traditional and new media.

The Biblical character of Rachel the Matriarch is a central figure in folktales, beliefs, and ritual, and seems to have been so at least since late antiquity. Previous research has identified a continuous cult at her tomb near the city of Bethlehem³ that began no later than the first half of the nineteenth century while an intermittent cult of local residents and occasional pilgrims has existed in some fashion at least since the High Middle Ages. A closer look reveals that the Rachel cult in general and folktales about the matriarch in particular raise broader questions that relate first of all to the threefold nexus of space, political arrangements, and the cult of holy places. In our specific case, as I will endeavor to show, this complex triad manifests both in the physical appearance of the tomb, in the people who serve as agents of the matriarch and conduct her rituals, and in the folktales surrounding her. All of these reflect a change in the gendered character of the cult. As can be seen in the article, the majority (though not all) of the stories I have chosen to discuss here were narrated predominantly by male storytellers. The stories narrated by female storytellers which are not discussed here, express, among other things, reactions to the same processes which I highlight presently. The vast majority of Jewish saint ritual in Israel is celebrated separately with gendered distinction, and the related folklore naturally carries a distinctly gendered character as well. The studies in this realm are likewise reflective of this fact, thus masculine folk creation in the context of saintly ritual is collected separately from that of women, and at times is even discussed separately.⁴

In the last two decades, the internet has functioned as a central arena for the creation, dissemination, and consumption of folk literature. In contemporary Israel, as in many places throughout the modern world, the internet as a medium for folk literature has emerged as even more dominant than oral tradition. Consequently, a significant portion of the stories discussed have been collected through netnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2023 among social networks, forums and websites associated with the cult. Additionally, stories disseminated through more traditional digital and printed media, such as radio, television, daily newspapers, printed pamphlets distributed in synagogues and by mail, as well as printed hagiographic collections, were also gathered. A smaller portion of the stories among the corpus was collected through fieldwork, primarily at the Rachel’s Tomb compound and among believers during 2021–2022. In total, some two hundred stories were collected from these sources. While the traditional methodology of collecting oral sources through fieldwork has the advantage of immediate and direct interaction with informants, allowing for a variety of perceptions, positions, and approaches of the believers in the immediate context of the research timing, the more innovative methodology of netnography offers an advantage in reconstructing the broader processes in these domains over time.

In this article, which focuses on a lengthy progression spanning three decades, analyses of a selection of folk tales collected from digital and printed sources will be presented.⁵ Aside from the fact that they reflect the aforementioned processes of cultic change, they also play a role in transcribing, reinforcing, and propelling these changes. To focus the discussion, I have concentrated here upon stories that have circulated in various historical and political contexts over the last three decades, centering around patron and agent figures who currently direct the Rachel cult. All of these stories, which have been disseminated and documented in the print, electronic, and digital media, fall into the genre of hagiography and hero worship.⁶

However, before addressing the transformation, I shall present the character of this triad in the years prior to the 1990s during which the cult was born, coalesced, documented, and first examined academically.

The image and roles of the matriarch Rachel from the Bible through the 1990s

Susan Starr Sered spent many years studying the history of the Jewish cult of Rachel and her tomb in Bethlehem.⁷ She was also the first to note that the Matriarch’s prominence in early Jewish folktales as they have reached us in the Bible, rabbinic midrashim and medieval stories, contrasts profoundly with the absence of testimony to a specific Rachel cult with linguistic, performative, and material aspects, prior to end of the nineteenth century.⁸ At the same time, there is no doubt that the folktales of antiquity, and especially saints’ legends, played an important role in shaping Rachel’s evolving image and role for the communities of the faithful over the generations and endowed the modern cult with its main elements.

Rachel appears in six different loci in the Bible, first as Jacob’s favorite wife⁹ who for many years was unable to conceive and yearned for a son.¹⁰ Ultimately she bore two, Joseph and Benjamin, but did not live to mother them, having died in childbirth on the high road near Bethlehem where she was buried.¹¹ She is subsequently mentioned in Jeremiah’s prophecy of consolation, weeping for her children and winning a divine promise that they would return to their homeland from exile in an enemy land.¹² Drawing upon these passages, the talmudic sages, and even more so rabbis in the Middle Ages, produced the figure of a holy mother (relatively uncommon in Jewish culture) who integrates the individual with the national.

The Talmud describes the younger, beloved, and favored sister as torn between loyalty to her father and loyalty to her beloved.¹³ Her modesty led her to cooperate with her sister and father in a contriving Leah’s deceitful marriage to Jacob, whilst the reward for her sacrifice was that Saul, the first king of Israel, descended from her line.¹⁴ In addition, while her womb was opened after she pleaded with her husband and God, she did not survive the birth of her second son, the youngest of Jacob’s children. As a result, she was buried in her own, individual tomb (on the outskirts of the town with which another famous birth story is associated). One result of this location is that she was the one who wept for the exiles – her other Israelite sons – as they trudged off to exile along the road that passed beside her gravesite. Moved by her tears, God promised that the exile would see an end and that from her tomb overlooking her children’s path to the enemy land, she would also see them returning to their territory.¹⁵

Throughout the Middle Ages, in the layers that were amassed upon the rabbinic midrashim of Lamentations Rabbah, Rachel’s tears were assigned a quasi- magical power capable of altering Divine decrees, first and foremost in the context of the Israelite exile, although relating also to other, both collective and individual difficulties as well. This progression in fact will form the basis of the practice of crying that has become a key component to the cult of Rachel since late Middle Ages.

Another development of the Middle Ages, in addition to the creation of Rachel’s literary character among these legends, is the first documentation of the geographical location of Rachel’s tomb as a place of Jewish cult by the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela in the 1160s.¹⁶ In his and other travelogs from the High Middle Ages, Rachel’s Tomb is a station along the pilgrims’ tour of saints’ tombs in Palestine, though no specific rituals are associated with it. Rather, it is merely a brief stop between the two more important sites, Jerusalem and Hebron. Petahiah of Regensburg, in the 1170s, recorded the narrative tradition he heard there – a tale of the attempt of monks from the nearby monastery to remove and make use of the stone of Rachel’s monument for the renovation of the monastery – yet the stone miraculously returned time and again.¹⁷

This in fact is one of a series of miracle tales that seem to have circulated among the local Jews and Jewish travelers during the Crusader period in Palestine,¹⁸ here, the frustrated attempt at desecration is a variation of tale type ATU 771, “Desecration Punished.” This early account, which even predates any evidence of a specific cult of Rachel or her tomb, already highlights the political and polemical element attached to the site from the outset. It is well known that sanctified spaces, by their very definition, bear heavy political implications for control of their location and for the relations between different religious groups.¹⁹ The politicization of Rachel’s Tomb however, is profoundly explicit, both in stories about it as well as in non-narrative references to it, perhaps owing to its liminal location between two cities identified with the origins of two faiths and the prophecies of the end of days. Likewise, we can also see that during the infancy of the Zionist movement, when a Rachel cult in fact coalesced, these political imports acquired greater and more explicit prominence, and reached their zenith in the context of the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict that continues today.²⁰

The research by Sered and others surrounding the cult, date its origin and consolidation to the renovation of the tomb in 1841 by the Anglo-Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore (1784–1885), with the encouragement, support, and evidently at the initiative of his wife, Judith (1784–1862).²¹ The special bond that the Montefiores, and especially Judith, felt to Rachel’s Tomb is in fact exemplified in several ways: her diaries describe the decision to renovate the tomb as her own initiative,²² her own tombstone was designed to resemble the renovated tomb, and soil from Rachel’s Tomb was placed beneath Moses Montefiore’s head at the time of his burial. In addition, in 1871, when Sir Moses asked the head of the Jewish community in Jerusalem to organize prayer vigils throughout the Holy Land to pray for the recovery of the Prince of Wales, the rabbi cabled back that he had done so, noting especially the prayers that been recited at “the tomb of the matriarch Rachel.”²³

The renovations funded by the Montefiores included reinforcement of the walls and the stone perimeter fence and the addition of an antechamber. As a result, a modest structure that had not stood out against its surroundings became a sheltered monument, whose iconic façade has been frequently reproduced since then in illustrations, photographs, postcards and souvenirs, and has remained engraved upon the collective memory even today, years after it has been modified beyond recognition.²⁴ However, I propose that for the Jewish cult, the most important and influential element of the Montefiores’ renovations was not in fact the new external casing, but rather the iron gate installed between the new antechamber and the tomb chamber. This gate was locked with an ornate key, the two copies of which were handed over for safekeeping to two Jewish wardens, one Ashkenazi and the other Sephardi, appointed by the community in Jerusalem. Thus Rachel’s Tomb became the first, and for many years the only, holy site in the Holy Land to which access was fully controlled by the Jews, even as adherents of several religions came to pray there.²⁵ The key itself in fact became an element of the material culture of the Rachel’s Tomb cult and was granted magical virtue to ensure easy childbirth.²⁶

The rebuilt structure on the main road, nestled in the heart of an olive grove, within a Muslim cemetery on the outskirts of Bethlehem, became a primary focus of Jewish worship, chiefly for those living in Jerusalem and its environs. Additional pilgrimage days were added to the two annual festivals of Passover and Lag ba’Omer that were already customary (usually falling out in April and May): the traditional date of Rachel’s death on 11 MarHeshvan (falling in the autumn months), the first day of each Hebrew month (associated with the lunar cycle), and the 30 days comprising the final Jewish month of Elul, plus the first ten days of the New Year (through the eve of Yom Kippur) – these rituals all conducted by men.²⁷ After the turn of the twentieth century, the cult gradually expanded from local Jerusalemite penitents to include Jews from all over the country, pilgrims from nearby countries, and even emissaries from Europe. At this point, according to the evidence, we detect an incipient feminization of the cult, with ululation, prayers for finding a husband, conception, easy childbirth, and good health, all of them led by women, initially Ashkenazi and later Sephardi as well.²⁸ In the late 1920s, the wardens opened the site to pilgrims and tourists on most weekdays and there was lively traffic to the shrine, especially on Jewish holidays and the specific dates of Rachel’s cult.

The growing feminization of the cult was accompanied by another trend – the site’s “nationalization” by the Jews. The wife and mother of Genesis and the midrashim, with whom Jewish women could identify, became the “mother of the nation” who mourns for her exiled children and promises that they will return to their homeland – not only from their ancient Biblical exile to Babylonia, but also from the extended exile that continued into the modern age.²⁹ The cult of tears, referenced above, in fact, fit in very well with the contemporary nationalist inclinations.

The Zionist settlers who began arriving in small waves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in greater numbers after the First World War, visited the tomb and kept up with developments there as reported in the Hebrew press. In effect, the site was adopted by the Zionist movement, including its secular members. The first Zionist leader, Theodor Herzl, upon his 1898 visit to Palestine, came to Rachel’s Tomb and was photographed outside of it. In 1920, many people turned out when the Zionist leadership conducted a memorial ceremony for him there.³⁰ The tomb’s metamorphosis into a Zionist national site was even more pronounced in subsequent decades. In the 1930s and 1940s it was the focus of dispute during the violent eruptions of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict and whenever the Zionists held memorial services there.

In addition to the customary weeping and prayers, as the cult crystallized it added material elements, some of which reflected its feminization.³¹ Aside from the magical properties ascribed to the key mentioned above, we hear of the custom of taking soil from near the tomb to use as a remedy for ill health or to be placed in one’s grave when the time came.³² From at least the end of the nineteenth century there are reports of the practice of wrapping a red string around the monument several times and then employing it as a charm in matters of barrenness, childbirth, finding a match, illness, and protection against the evil eye. Sered found that this practice, prevalent chiefly among women, was the most prominent ritual associated with the tomb; it has continued, with some modifications, to the present day.³³ In addition, once Jewish control of the tomb was formalized, the site attracted donations – oil lamps, wall curtains, ritual objects, and other items of use for pilgrims, such as pillows, blankets, and oil for the lamps. All of this was accompanied by the recitation of Psalms, special prayers, and liturgical poems.³⁴ Many testimonies by pilgrims, wardens, and later, in media reports and scholars’ fieldwork, highlight the nature of the Rachel’s Tomb cult as centered not only upon the figure of a saintly woman, but also upon female worshipers. The feminine character of the rituals and prayers is also manifested in a series of stories of individual salvations, especially of women’s pregnancy after barrenness and recovery from illness.

Note that despite women’s general domination of the rituals, some continued to be conducted by men. These include prayers that are not for an individual but on behalf of the community, mainly of a political nature, such as the afore-mentioned kabbalists’ prayers for the recovery of the Prince of Wales in 1871. Likewise, in the summer of 1942 there are reports of several public prayer ceremonies led by Jerusalem kabbalists, intended to rouse the sainted matriarch to help turn back the German armies that were advancing through Egypt towards Palestine.³⁵ In addition, as noted by Kobi Cohen-Hattab and Chaim Noy, throughout the years, both before 1948 and certainly after 1967, men played a key role as mediators between the matriarch and her devotees, managing the tomb compound and documenting events there.³⁶ These men represented the various authorities who oversaw activities at the site – initially Moses Montefiore, later the wardens, and, after Israel gained control of the tomb in 1967, military officers and representatives of the Ministry of Religions. Throughout these years this male agency was always but a mantle cloaking the daily rites, which, as noted, were mainly feminine in nature.

Visions of the matriarch and conflicts, from the Oslo accords to the Rabin assassination: Hanan Porat

The first half of the 1990s is the latest period of the Rachel cult documented and discussed by Sered. Scholarly attention to later years, such as by the journalist Nadav Shragai, has focused upon control of the tomb compound and its changing appearance, mainly as the result of political events. This attention by and large ignores topics such as the nature of the cult and the folktales associated with the tomb.

The first apparition tale to be discussed here is also the earliest that has been documented. It was related by Hanan Porat (1943–2011), who in the early 1990s was a prominent leader of the religious right in Israel, and especially of the settlement movement in the occupied territories. Porat, who combined the aura of spiritual leader and political leader, spoke of the site with great emotion on more than one occasion.

In some of his remarks he drew a link between the Biblical holy woman, who according to tradition died on 11 MarHeshvan, and another prominent Jew who died on 12 MarHeshvan – Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The text below appeared in a weekly synagogue bulletin published more than a decade after the incident it recounts, in an exposition of the story of Rachel in Genesis:

This happened 12 years ago, at the end of the Sabbath […] in the year 5756.³⁷

The masses were cheering and singing the “Song of Peace” in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, which at the time was Kings of Israel Square, but I was far away from their joyful tumult, which struck me as hollow and fake. I was driving from Jerusalem towards Bethlehem to visit the tomb of the Matriarch Rachel on the anniversary of her death, whose observance that year had been deferred until Saturday night because of the sanctity of the Sabbath.

Just when I reached the Mar Elias Monastery I innocently turned on my car radio and was shocked to hear the cries of grief from the square.

Shocked, I pulled over to the side of the road and listened to Eitan Haber’s³⁸ tortured announcement that Yitzhak Rabin was dead.

[…] And then suddenly, as if from a great distance, the sound of crying reached my ears: “Rachel weeping for her children.” I bit my lips until they bled and pondered: now, at this very moment, Rachel is weeping for the death of Yitzhak Rabin, because “he is gone.”³⁹

Because our mother Rachel – all were her sons and every Jew is her only son. […] And now Rachel is crying for Yitzhak Rabin, her only son, because he is gone … whom she has not forgotten even today.⁴⁰

In the months after the assassination of the prime minister of Israel, on 4 November 1995, Porat took part in several dialogue and reconciliation meetings between religious and nonreligious Jews – a format that was quite popular in Israeli society then – where, according to his account, he would tell this story.⁴¹

I propose that the story of Rachel’s appearance to Porat on the night of her memorial is merely the climax of the process that turned Porat, both in hagiography and in auto- hagiography,⁴² into a new type of agent required by Rachel – a politico-spiritual patron. The need for this new type of cult agent for both matriarch and site stemmed directly from the political events of the early 1990s: Notably the interim agreements between Israelis and Palestinians signed between 1993 and 1995, known as the Oslo process, and specifically the negotiations for the Oslo 2 agreement providing for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Palestinian towns on the West Bank, including Bethlehem, home to the tomb. For the first time in a generation, there was a serious question as to the continued exclusive Israeli Jewish control of Rachel’s Tomb and the access roads to it, especially from Jerusalem.

The fact that this question came up, and that in the final interim agreement, signed in 1994, Rachel’s Tomb and the access road to it remained an Israeli- controlled enclave within the territory of the new Palestinian Authority, modified the form of the cult and consequently also affected other folk cultural expressions associated with Rachel and her tomb. This included a major change in the character and roles of the agents who mediate between her and the community of believers. Porat’s revelation on the night of Rabin’s assassination, which was also the anniversary of Rachel’s death, motivated him to be actively involved in the efforts at reconciliation between the different sectors of Israeli Jewish society – not only because of his unique position as a Jewish leader who lived in the area and combined political activity with a spiritual and even mystical way of life, but also because of his unusual activity directly associated with Rachel and her tomb in the years before this experience. He told several stories about this work as well, later in fact to be repeated by his students.

According to one of these stories, Porat, together with the Ultra-Orthodox Knesset member Menachem Porush,⁴³ met Rabin a few days before signing the Oslo 2 agreement, trying to persuade him not to give up the Israeli control on Rachel’s Tomb and the road leading to it from Jerusalem. Rabin was so moved by the emotional outburst of those two religious political leaders, that he decided to change the agreement moments before it was signed so that the holy site and the road leading to it would remain in the control of the I.D.F. Moreover, we know of at least two other versions of the story of a rabbi who got Rabin to change his mind just before the signing of the Oslo 2 agreement and persuaded him to leave Rachel’s Tomb under Israeli control. In each of them, the rabbi (Israel Meir Lau or Mordechai Eliyahu, both of whom served as chief rabbi during or near the time of the events) calls Rabin and admonishes him with powerful emotion, emphasizing the family sentiment and the “treatment of Mother Rachel,” thus convincing him to modify the agreement.⁴⁴

In addition to the above stories, there are other tales about Porat and the steps he took even before the meeting with Rabin to guarantee a continued Israeli Jewish presence at Rachel’s Tomb. According to one story, for example, Porat was behind the establishment of the clandestine yeshiva in the tomb compound, “Rachel’s Consolation,” whose students ignored a government ban and smuggled sacred books into the compound. Later they used ropes to secretly hoist items such as beds and kitchen equipment over the wall separating the tomb from the adjacent Muslim cemetery, in order to facilitate permanent residence there, with sleeping accommodations for the (male) students.⁴⁵ Years later, Porat was considered to be one of the main advocates of lifting the security restrictions for visitors and pilgrims to the tomb.⁴⁶

As a character in these stories, Porat is a new type of agent for the matriarch – one whose link with her is based not upon his ability to appeal to her or invoke her to action, but rather upon the patronage of his own words and deeds aimed at guaranteeing Israeli and Jewish control of the site associated with her – Rachel’s Tomb. Thus he ensures the continuation of her Jewish cult whose members’ new profile we can characterize no longer as devout women, occasional pilgrims who visit the shrine when they have a problem and make individual supplications, but the students of a permanent educational institution, young men from the religious Zionist sector, who ensure an around-the-clock presence of the faithful, in order to keep it “Jewish.”

In the new situation created by the Oslo Accords in which Israeli Jewish control of the tomb could no longer be taken for granted, this form of agency responded to the needs of the day. It is no accident that the characters in these stories, especially Porat but also Rabbis Lau and Eliyahu, combine rabbinic prestige with political clout and position, and were recognized and accepted by various Jewish and Zionist sectors, not only those from whence they emerged. In any case however, the duty to protect Rachel’s Tomb and keep it under Jewish control would soon spread from the political and civilian echelons to the military.

Protecting Rachel who protects soldiers

As the conflict over Rachel’s Tomb escalated from political to physical violence, the compound’s external appearance altered. Already in 1967, when the IDF captured the area, its location in the heart of a residential neighborhood was very different from the image etched upon the memories of those who remembered it from before 1948 and especially those who “knew” it from the many illustrations which froze a scene that had not existed for at least several decades prior. Afterall, the changes in the 1990s involved not only the tomb’s surroundings but also its very structure: Concrete barriers were erected around it after a series of violent clashes in the last week of September 1996.⁴⁷ The next years saw the completion of a massive renovation that effectively created a new fortress-like structure, with a roof above and walls all around the older structure, enclosing what had previously been the courtyard and walls.⁴⁸ The tomb’s new appearance at the dawn of the twenty-first century provided the backdrop for another change in the stories told about it and the character of the cult agents, a change that coalesced during the violent clashes that began in September 2000, known as the “Al-Aqsa Intifada.”

A striking manifestation of this change can be found in the figure of the young Israeli officer, Ariel Hovav. In the first months of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Hovav, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Elqana, was the military commander of the Rachel’s Tomb compound. In 2002, shortly after he left this assignment, Hovav was killed in a terror attack near a checkpoint elsewhere in the occupied territories. Unlike Porat, Hovav remains relatively unknown outside the circles of the National Religious Jewish sector in Israel; his name and the various stories about him circulate chiefly among residents of the Jewish settlements of the West Bank. One episode in a movie made to mark the tenth anniversary of his death⁴⁹ focused upon the young officer’s connection with Rachel’s Tomb: Against the backdrop of a photo of his children carrying the Torah scroll that had been donated to the tomb in his memory, the men who had served under him remember that they had asked him why it was necessary to risk the lives of soldiers and civilians and maintain a military outpost at a shrine that is closed to visitors, that has no tactical significance, and where a military presence is difficult and dangerous. Hovav, who assigned great weight to the ideological justification of his assignment, invited lecturers from nearby Jewish settlements to make his soldiers aware of who Rachel is and the importance of Jewish control of the tomb. Later in the film, Miriam Adani, a key figure in the organizations that conduct the female rituals at the tomb, recalled an interchange with Hovav:

I used to phone Ariel. “Ariel, are you at Rachel’s Tomb?” And he would say, “What do you need?” I told him, “There’s someone who’s in intensive care and is in urgent need of prayer.” “I’m getting into my jeep now and going to the tomb.” He would go inside the tomb. No one was at Rachel’s Tomb! He would call me and say, “Miriam, I’m standing now in Rachel’s Tomb next to the monument. What name did you want to pray for?” And he would say the name, pray, and tell me, “I did it.”

The story is set, as mentioned, in the early days of the second intifada, when there was actual fighting in the Bethlehem area and civilians were not allowed to approach Rachel’s Tomb. Hovav is presented as having taken upon himself, in addition to his military duties, the role of an active physical mediator between the matriarch and her devotees – an emissary who does what they cannot do themselves. This practice, in which the matriarch’s agent not only mediates between her and her devotees, but also personally conducts the ritual on the site, was already familiar under the British Mandate, when, in return for a tip, the wardens of the tomb would pray and light candles on behalf of worshipers who could not be there themselves.⁵⁰ As we shall see, these practices would later serve as the basis for an entire system of remote ritual.

What is exceptional then in this story is not the practice itself, but the identity of the agent: not a salaried warden, rabbi, or other religious functionary, but an army officer, who is at the tomb because he is stationed there and the story esteems his willingness to assume other functions that are no less important for the narrating society. In addition to the remote ritual and ideological education of his soldiers, the young officer (according to the stories) also made sure to provide security for pilgrimages to the tomb by celebrities whom he allowed, by virtue of his authority, to come to the military compound. In one such circumstance Adani recalls how Hovav acquiesced to allowing the popular American Jewish performer, Mordechai ben David, in to the tomb – on the condition that Ben David perform for his soldiers and provide Hovav his autograph.

The emotional climax of the film, however, is the story about the circumcision ceremony for his son Elad Joseph, born several months before Hovav was killed. The story is told by Hovav’s brother, against pictures of Hovav in his paratrooper officer’s uniform feeding his infant son, to the accompaniment of a Yiddish pop-song about Rachel’s weeping in the background.

I remember the conversation well, when Ariel says to me: ‘I have a new son!’ […] And then my mother asks him, ‘You surely don’t want to tell me that you’re making the brit at Rachel’s Tomb?!’ And Ariel says, ‘Obviously I’m going to have the brit at Rachel’s Tomb!’

[Ariel’s mother:] I told him, ‘People won’t come! They won’t come!’ He answered, ‘Don’t worry, Mom. Don’t worry, Mom’.

And you know what? The brit went off like clockwork and there were about 200 people there. Who would believe that there would be a brit at Rachel’s Tomb ten years ago? Things like that didn’t happen! […]

[Miriam Adani:] The circumcision ceremony that Ariel held here was truly historic, after centuries when there was no circumcision ceremony at Rachel’s Tomb. Everyone remembers this circumcision, because people were there who hadn’t been to Rachel’s Tomb since the Six Day War.

Adani’s assertion that there had been no circumcisions at Rachel’s Tomb for centuries was not entirely accurate. In fact, there are no records of any circumcision ceremony ever at the site before Elad Hovav’s in 2002. It goes without saying that several years later, after the restrictions on civilian access to the site were lifted, circumcision ceremonies became one of the most popular practices there and today several are held there each day. In this sense, Ariel Hovav was not only an agent of the matriarch’s cult but also pivotal in shaping it. He also fit this role on both the material and symbolic planes: The fervently religious officer was able to obtain the loan of Elijah’s Chair from Joseph’s Tomb, another place to which Israelis did not have access at the time, located as it is deep within the Palestinian territories. According to the official IDF webpage in his memory: “At his firstborn son’s circumcision Ariel spared no effort to bring the chair from the tomb of Joseph, the son, to the tomb of Rachel, his mother.”⁵¹ In effect, Ariel Hovav is remembered less as a brave warrior than as an agent of the Biblical saint who challenged and nullified the boundaries between generations and eras, time and space, and did the impossible: beyond protecting the matriarch and ensuring the continuation of her cult, Hovav also corrected the historical record, symbolically bringing together the mother and her son at an event to mark the birth of his own son (whose middle name is Joseph), and likewise a profound symbolic masculinization of the cult.

The popular stories that present the martyred Arial Hovav as the new patron of the Rachel cult combine the political, ideological, and mystical elements we have encountered for one with Porat, with military and masculine traits. Unlike most stories about agents of Rachel’s cult, however, none of those about Ariel Hovav include the matriarch’s revelation to him. Rather, the epiphany is replaced by his martyrdom. The public imagination of his death, in a battle that took place shortly after the end of his tenure as commander of the Rachel’s Tomb compound, provides the narrative closure required to make him the matriarch’s patron saint. As Adani put it:

I think that … because of and by virtue of Ariel’s devotion, Rachel’s Tomb is in our hands today. He simply gave his life and did everything so there would never be a situation in which a Jew who wants to come to Rachel’s Tomb cannot do so.

The fact that these stories are told again and again, beginning with Lt. Hovav’s military funeral and later at subsequent public events in his memory, demonstrates that the narrators see him as another link in the chain of agents of Rachel’s cult, and even one of its shapers. Thus the literary figure of Ariel Hovav broadens the spectrum of backgrounds from which such characters can emerge.

The links among Rachel, the rituals at her tomb, soldiers and the Israeli- Palestinian conflict figure as well in another story that has appeared in several versions since the late aughts. Unlike the others, this best known revelation of recent decades is not set in the tomb compound or nearby. Instead, Rachel appeared to IDF troops in various places in Gaza Strip during operation Cast Lead of late December 2008.⁵² The earliest versions of the story, documented already in the midst of the operation, had it that a woman in Arab garb circulated in Gaza neighborhoods and warned IDF squads in Hebrew not to enter structures that had been mined; she identified herself as the matriarch Rachel. In at least one case a soldier reported his own, first-hand encounter.⁵³ Several versions refer to former Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu (1929–2010), who at the time was already seriously ill and died about a year later. They report that despite his illness, a few days before the operation was launched, he went to Rachel’s Tomb and sent her to protect the soldiers in the future military operation.⁵⁴ The earliest documentation of this version appears in a sermon preached by his son, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the day after the end of the operation, on 19 January 2019:

There’s a story that I’d like to tell you now, one that I couldn’t tell if I hadn’t heard it with my own ears. […] Soldiers say … in several places they went in Gaza there was a woman who warned them. She told them, ‘Be careful, this building is mined’ or ‘There’s an ambush here.’ They saw her in several places. ‘Who are you?’ they asked. She replied, ‘I’m Mother Rachel.’ Quite a story! I asked, I met some important yeshiva dean, and he told me: ‘Rabbi, this isn’t a story, I know the guy.’ […] Then he said, ‘Tell me, is this connected to the fact that Rabbi Eliyahu left the hospital and went specially to Rachel’s Tomb before the war? […] I told him: ‘I don’t know. I’ll ask the rabbi.’ […]

So, I went to him on tiptoe and said: ‘[…] ‘To believe it? Not to believe it? True? False?’ He looks at me and says, ‘Yes, it’s correct […] I told her.’ – I’m repeating the words he said to me – ‘I said to her, “Rachel, there’s a war. Donot withold thy voice from weeping. Go to the Holy One Blessed Be He and pray for the soldiers, who are risking their lives for the sake of the people of Israel, that they should batter the enemy and not be battered themselves”.’⁵⁵

Although his son told the story as a first-hand report – a fabulate⁵⁶ – it has been told by many others since then, almost every time that Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu is mentioned in association with Rachel’s Tomb. In it we have the rabbi, viewed by the Israeli public as embodying the seam between the National Religious and Ultraorthodox sectors, as the most recent link in a chain of agents much like him – Iraqi-born rabbis living in Jerusalem, such as Rabbi Salman Mutzafi, who, during World War II when the region faced grave danger with the impending approach of Rommel’s forces, entreated the Biblical matriarch to exercise her power in order to protect her sons and help them strike down their enemies.

Other stories about Rabbi Eliyahu cast him not only as an agent able to enlist the matriarch to help IDF soldiers in their battle against the Palestinian enemy, but also, like the other agents discussed above, as protecting her against the same enemy. In a 2017 ceremony at Rabbi Eliyahu’s grave to mark the anniversary of Rachel’s death, Rabbi Yosef Alnakave, the former personal assistant of the late Rabbi Eliyahu, related the story of Rachel’s 2008 appearance to the soldiers in Gaza, prefacing it with another story, set earlier, immediately following the occupation of the tomb in 1967. According to that story, Eliyahu was deeply saddened in attending the place after the war, surrounded as it was by houses. He then convinced a young soldier driving a bulldozer to entirely raze the residential district surrounding the tomb, in order to make Rachel stop crying.⁵⁷

The linkage of a story that ostensibly took place during the 1967 war with another set 40 years later, provides an etiological explanation of the later one: Rachel responded to her patron’s pleas and protected the soldiers in Gaza, thereby returning the favor of his instigating a soldier to protect her and at once hearkening a new form of patronage in Eliyahu’s character.

The salvation hotline and full masculinization of the cult

The stories in which Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu is the patron and defender of Rachel’s Tomb are documented from the last years of his life, that is, around the end of the first decade of the present century. It was around then that another visual makeover of Rachel’s Tomb was completed which once again influenced the nature of the cult, namely, the erection of the separation wall and the Government decision that its path would loop around Rachel’s Tomb to include it on the Israeli side. When the barrier was completed, the heavy concrete walls (reaching between eight and ten meters high) became the most prominent architectural and visual element at the site, entirely isolating it from its surroundings, with residential Bethlehem rendered invisible behind the walls. In addition to this physical change, there was another one – at first unofficial – in the rules governing the cult, once all the limitations upon Jewish visitors were effectively eliminated at the end of September 2008. It was no longer necessary to coordinate one’s arrival in advance with the military authorities, nor to come in an organized group or by public transportation, as during the previous decade. In this way Rachel’s Tomb was de facto annexed to Jerusalem as only a few minutes’ drive along one of the city’s main thoroughfares brings worshipers there without the need to cross walls, roadblocks, or security checks. Such total and strikingly visible Israeli Jewish control of the tomb and its surroundings never before existed. From the symbolic perspective, as both the folk narratives and the new ritual practices make clear, Jewish control of the matriarch is no longer in question. Accordingly, she has less need of patrons to protect her against the Palestinian threat. Thus, the cult can once again focus upon individual and domestic matters, as had been the case until the start of the Oslo process.

The last agent I shall present embodies what I believe is the most prominent manifestation of this last change. Although he is relatively anonymous to the Israeli public at large, almost every Jew in Israel is familiar with his activity. Moshe Menachem Kluger runs a nonprofit organization called the Rachel’s Tomb Institutions, established in 2005. The organization enjoys a major online presence; notorious for its use of telephone spam advertisements, it also maintains several websites and an email distribution list and has accounts on social networks, especially WhatsApp and Facebook. In addition, it employs more traditional channels of the Ultraorthodox sector, such as pamphlets and flyers that are placed in mailboxes and synagogues. It organizes transportation to Rachel’s Tomb, funds a yeshiva for young married men and midnight study sessions at the tomb, and publishes a vast assortment of miraculous salvation stories. At least some of its annual revenues derive from donations by private callers to its “salvation hotline” – a telephone number, an email address, and an internet address where people can submit requests, chiefly regarding a livelihood, finding a match, good health, and children, and make a financial contribution. In return, students at the kollel pray for them. The organization also offers a wide assortment of amulets for sale over the web, as well as publications that recount their miraculous powers in stories of deliverance related to commercial success, livelihood, family, and the return of sons who have left the fold, as well as individuals’ escape from security threats (including terror attacks and missile barrages) and other dangers (such as disease and traffic accidents).⁵⁸

The relatively modern side of Kluger’s Rachel’s Tomb Institutions involves the multiple media through which it reaches the public, rather than the content. In addition to the channels of communication, however, the stories’ format is also novel for the sector. For example, most of the leaflets they distribute include a comic strip that recounts some miracle or rescue. The graphics stick to the same mold (for example, no frontal depictions of women, but only a purple shadow) and employ a fixed narrative format: a miracle that saved an individual or family that were facing some difficulty after they made a contribution to the organization.

By way of example, the comic strip in issue no. 24⁵⁹ tells the story of a young yeshiva student at who married in the winter of 1989 but by the winter of 2018 yet remained childless. After conferring with his wife, on the holiday of Tu Bishvat (Jewish Arbor Day) – around the date the issue appeared – he goes to Rachel’s Tomb to pray for a child. When he gets there, he discovers that, without their knowledge, some of their relatives had made a donation in their name to the Rachel’s Tomb Institutions’ Salvation Hotline and their name is actually already on the list of those to be prayed for. During the event he bumps into a friend from his yeshiva days who already has grandchildren. The friend reminds the hero of some transgression he committed in the past that is perhaps linked to the harsh decree against him. It seems that during the Knesset election campaign in 1988, when two Ultraorthodox parties were competing for votes, the young man had spoken disrespectfully of the rabbi who was the spiritual leader of the rival party. The proximity of the elections to his wedding suggested that there might be a link between the sin and the punishment, and the man takes his friend’s words to heart. Without delay he assembles a prayer quorum and drives with them to the rabbi’s grave to beg his forgiveness. The conclusion is clear: Approximately one year later the man returns to Rachel’s Tomb and proudly announces to Rabbi Kluger that his son was born the night before.

The nature of the stories of Kluger as Rachel’s agent differs from that of the tales of agents in the nineties and aughts. Now, when Jewish control of Rachel’s Tomb is no longer at issue, we have ostensibly returned to the familiar and well- known stories of an end to barrenness, or, if we recall the late Bina Greenwald related above, a personal salvation for one soul who lacks descendants. However, anyone who meets with that story, like these in our comic strip, cannot fail to observe how they differ from those that circulated in the earlier period of the Rachel cult: Both the Biblical matriarch and the late Mrs. Greenwald require the agency of the men who perform the actual practice of prayers and blessings, whilst the living women fall into the shadows as their comic representations. Likewise, here, in a telling paradox, the entire story of barrenness, as well as its solution, involves men exclusively. It was the political battles of men that led to the lack of children and the perceptiveness of men that resolved the matter. Rachel and her tomb are merely the backdrop for encounters among men and the solution of their problems, which, even when associated with pregnancy and childbirth, are reframed as male issues.

Another and even more pronounced example of the masculinization of the Rachel cult in the last decades is how Kluger’s website deals with the fundamentally female ritual of wrapping a red thread around the tomb, advertising the age-old renowned charm as a gift for supporters of his organization, wrapped especially by the Institutions’ rabbis, well-versed in the ritual, and replacing those sold by the “crooks” who sell meaningless threads, with no power, at exorbitant rates. Instructions to offer a donation to the organization immediately follow.

As previously noted, for as long as it has been known, the red string ritual at Rachel’s Tomb has been identified with female religion. Women circled the monument with the red string; they cut it into pieces and even made their living by selling it. This online advertisement constitutes a blatant male appropriation of the ritual and a demand that women refrain from it.

My decision to conclude with this example is intentional, as it represents the most striking manifestation of what appears to be the primary development in the Rachel cult over the three decades following the political negotiations preceding the Oslo process. All stories in this article center around men, portraying them as sons, agents, and mediators for the Biblical matriarch. They are the dominant force in reshaping major elements of the cult and the evolving folk narratives surrounding it. In a society with a strong militaristic orientation, such as the Jewish society in Israel, it is not surprising that men are also dominant in the worship of a female holy figure. However, the findings from the analysis of these stories reveal a more complex reality.

The cult in question has undergone a gendered transformation. Rachel’s “daughters,” who led and shaped the cult for 150 years, until the early 1990s, have been marginalized. They were sidelined by geopolitical processes that, ostensibly, initially aimed at regional demilitarization through territorial compromises. In fact, these processes, it seems, undermined the Jewish believers’ confidence in their exclusive control over the site associated with holiness. This unique context made physical control of the tomb a key issue, redirecting the nature of the cult and the gender of its new leaders.

Acknowledgements

I thank the foundation for its generous contribution. I also thank Rishona Fine, my talented and devoted research assistant, for her excellent work and remarks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article is part of a research project funded by the Israel Science Foundation.

Notes on contributors

David Rotman

David Rotman is an Associate Professor in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Department of Hebrew Literature and in the Graduate Program in Folklore and Folk Culture at the Faculty of Humanities. His book, “Dragons, Demons and Wondrous Realms: The Marvelous in Medieval Hebrew Narrative”, was published in 2016 in Hebrew by Ben Gurion University Press. He has also published more than two dozen of articles dealing with Jewish folk narratives from late antiquity to modern days. His current research project, supported by the ISF grant, examines the image of Rachel the Matriarch in Contemporary Israeli folk literature and culture.

Notes

1 The city of Bethlehem is part of the Palestinian Authority, but Rachel’s Tomb is an enclave controlled by Israel. See below.

2 https://m.facebook.com/groups/1746517145627294?view=permalink&id=2315539185391751 (last Accessed July 31, 2019).

3 It should be noted that the tomb is currently located geographically along the main street of the city.

4 Those stories told by female narrators will be the focus of a separate article. Specifically with regards to the cult of Rachel, stories primarily from female believers, especially those collected orally during fieldwork at Rachel's Tomb, have recently been the subject of two significant research studies, one by Carli Anderson and the other by Nurit Stadler. While I concur with a notable part of Anderson’s observations in her work and Stadler’s in her own, there still are other elements which I dispute, although I am unable to elaborate upon this here. See Anderson, “Weeping” and Stadler, Voices of the Ritual, 49–55, 73–80, 107–16.

5 For a few among many examples of theoretical discussions about the internet as medium of folk literature, see: Blank, “Toward a Conceptual Framework,” 1–21; Bronner, “Digitizing and Virtualizing Folklore,” 21–67; Fernback, “Legends on the Net,” 29–45; Fialkova, “Ghosts in the Cyber World,” 64–89; Miller, “Face-to-Face with the Digital Folk,” 212–31; Voolaid, “Click ‘Like’ and Post It on Your Wall!” 73–98. The most up-to-date survey on this subject can be found in the Ph.D. dissertation of Maayan Mora g. See Morag, “New Directions,” 12–15.

6 In a certain sense, the present study builds upon and discusses the findings of Nurit Stadler and Nimrod Luz about Rachel’s Tomb and the nearby “Our Lady of the Wall” mural in Stadler and Luz, “Two Venerated Mothers,” 127–41. They suggest that sacred sites are gaining an important role in dictating geopolitical and national borders. Moreover, the rising power of religious factors in multi-scalar settings has led to a growing phenomenon whereby borders are superimposed in juxtaposition to religious landmarks (most often sacred sites)” (127). Other studies relevant to the topic include Breger, Reiter and Hammer, “Introduction,” 20–1; Raz, “Children Shall Come Again,” 332–54; Selwyn, “Ghettoizing a Matriarch,” 39–55; and Stadler, Voices of the Ritual. I move in the diametrically opposite direction and consider the impact of geopolitical developments on saints’ cults in general and on the Rachel cult in particular.

7 E.g., Sered, “Tale of Three Rachels,” 5–41, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40326473; Sered, “Rachel’s Tomb and the Milk Grotto,” 7–22; Sered, “Rachel, Mary, and Fatima,” 131–46. See also below note 8.

8 Sered noted this important distinction, which sees what she calls “myth” as only one element and not sufficient for speaking of a full-fledged cult. In this respect, a “full-fledged cult” of Rachel, including a unique name, space, performance practices, fixed pilgrimage dates, and objects, along with stories, has existed (so far as the available documentation reports) only since the mid-nineteenth century. See Sered, “Development of a Cult,” 103–48. For other evidence of the cult’s origin before the twentieth century, including the use of a “red thread” and regular pilgrimages on specific dates, see Shragai, At the Crossroads.

9 Gen. 29:16–18.

10 Gen. 30:1.

11 Gen. 35:16–20.

12 Jer. 31:15–17.

13 As was noted by Sered (“Development of a Cult,” 105–6), the stories found in early post-biblical texts such as the Pseudepigrapha do not substantially expand on the biblical account of Rachel and her symbolism. The character described here seems to have first emerged in the folklore of late antiquity.

14 BT Megillah 13b.

15 Rashi (R. Salomon Isaacides, 1040–1105), commentary on Gen. 30:22; Chana Shacham-Rosby convincingly elaborates in her MA thesis about the rise of the Jewish post-Biblical literature of Rachel the Matriarch as a complex response to the rise of the Marian cult in eastern churches during the Byzantine era. See Shacham-Rosby, “From His Place,” 26–47. This assumption becomes more pronounced in light of the fact that among Jewish Biblical commentators, the debate over the location of Rachel's Tomb, based on various biblical verses, has continued in one form or another to this day. While we will not delve into the details of this debate here, it is indisputable that by no later than the fourth century CE, the site near the city of Bethlehem became the exclusive location identified as Rachel’s Tomb among the majority of believers and Jewish pilgrims henceforth. About the dispute see for example: Elitzur, “Signs of Saul.”

16 “From Jerusalem it is two parasangs to Bethlehem […] and close thereto, at a distance of about half a mile, at the parting of the way, is the pillar of Rachel’s grave, which is made up of eleven stones, corresponding with the number of the sons of Jacob (except Benjamin) Upon it is a cupola resting on four columns, and all the Jews that pass by carve their names upon the stones of the pillar” (Benjamin and Adler, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, 25).

17 Pethahiah, Ainsworth and Benisch, Travels of Rabbi Petachia, 56–7.

18 Reiner, “A Jewish Response.”

19 See, e.g., the editor’s introduction to Eade and Sallnow, Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. On the Holy Land in the Middle Ages, see Limor, “Sharing Sacred.”

20 This was noted by Shragai, At the Crossroads, and by Stadler and Luz, “Two Venerated Mothers.”

21 Two earlier dates also contributed to the formal recognition of Rachel’s Tomb as a Jewish cult site, placing it under the direct control of the Jewish community of Jerusalem and later making it a “pan – Jewish” site: In 1795, the rabbis of Jerusalem announced that only the community’s delegated representatives were entitled to receive payment for a blessing at the Tomb, thereby making the community’s presumptive authority over the site official (at least within the Jewish world). See Ben-Yaacob, Meyuhas Family, 309–10. In 1830 and 1831 the leaders of the Sephardi community obtained a firman from the Ottoman authorities that Jews should be permitted to pray at Rachel’s Tomb without let or hindrance (Shragai, At the Crossroads, 50–1).

22 Montefiore, Montefiore and Loewe, Diaries, 182.

23 Ibid., 241. Some researchers cite Judith Montefiore’s childlessness as a reason for her strong attachment to Rachel’s Tomb. There is no direct evidence of this. Cf. Sered, “Development of a Cult,” 116–19; Shragai, At the Crossroads, 52–61. Regardless, the general acceptance of this theory as fact is itself evidence that the popular view of the Rachel’s Tomb cult as led by women and serving chiefly to satisfy women’s needs transcends classes and periods.

24 See for example the Christian traveler and artist John Fulleylove, who visited Palestine around the turn of the twentieth century, who attached the following caption to one of his paintings of the Tomb: “The saints and heroes of Israel, claimed also by Mohammedans and Christians, have achieved a kind of funereal immortality which makes the whole land seem one vast graveyard. Every prospect is dotted with tombs. […] None of them, however, is at all so impressive as the tomb of Rachel, where a modern house and dome cover a rough block of stone” (Kelman and Fulleylove, The Holy Land, 230).

25 In his article, Glenn Bowman refutes the common but mistaken idea that “Montefiore purchased Rachel’s Tomb for the benefit of the Jewish communities” (see, e.g., Freimann and Ben Shahar, Gate Opener, 115). Jewish nationalists exploit this unfounded idea to assert control of the tomb. In fact, the plot occupied by Rachel’s Tomb’s was consecrated property and could not be sold. I believe, however, that Bowman goes astray in his overemphasis of the “shared cult” that supposedly existed there until 1948. There were indeed Jewish, Christian, and Muslim rituals at the tomb, but the importance of the site for the various Jewish communities, from the mid-nineteenth century until 1948, far overshadowed the relatively sporadic prayers there by local Christians and Muslims who visited the tomb as individuals, the rites by Bedouin who buried their dead nearby, or prayers by tourists from abroad who made the tomb one more brief stop on their itinerary. Yet the extraordinary permission given the Jews to exclude non-Jewish pilgrims from the interior of the structure cannot be ignored. Of course, this says nothing of the right of contemporary Israelis to control the site and is merely an attempt to explain the vast changes that have taken place at what was previously a relatively marginal site for Jewish worshipers. See Bowman, “Sharing and Exclusion.”

26 On the ritual of the key, see Levin, “Fantastic Key Encounters.”

27 One of the earliest ethnographers of the Jewish communities in Palestine, Abraham M. Luncz, stressed that the customs are those of Jews from Jerusalem, mainly Ashkenazim. See Luncz, Literarischer Palästina-Almanach 1904, 14; Ibid. 1908, 19.

28 Sered, “Development of a Cult,” 121–5; Shragai, At the Crossroads, 75–94.

29 Sered, “Development of a Cult,” 128–32.

30 Shragai, At the Crossroads, 87–8. Modern proto-Zionists’ and Zionists’ attitude towards the rituals at the Tomb has been ambivalent and sometimes almost hostile. But this has not prevented them from seeing the site as a symbol of both their national aspirations and their modern inclinations.

31 See, e.g., how the Zionist leader and journalist Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, in his newspaper, Hatzvi (May 3, 1895), endorsed the project of schoolchildren to hang a curtain in Rachel’s Tomb in memory of a female classmate who had passed away, which had been torn to shreds by Ultraorthodox worshipers. On this affair, see Sered, “Development of a Cult,” 128–32.

32 Freimann and Ben Shahar, Gate Opener, 164.

33 Sered, “Development of a Cult,” 30, 36. Eli Teman surveyed the manifestations of this custom starting in the 1980s, however, she did not probe its historical roots which are documented at least eight decades prior. See Teman, “The Red String.”

34 Freimann and Ben Shahar, Gate Opener, 159.

35 See Dvir, Rabbi Yehudah Ftayya, 235–7. These events themselves have been studied in their own right: Harari, “Three Charms,” 180–5.

36 Cohen-Hattab and Noy, “Of Place and Text.”

37 November 4, 1995.

38 The Government secretary at the time.

39 This and the above refer to Jer 31:14.

40 Hanan Porat, “A Small Bit of Light” (weekly portion of Vayishlach 5768 [November 2007]), unpaginated. Porat saw that Hebrew text of Jeremiah employing the singular – “he is gone” (translators throughout the centuries, have deviated from the Hebrew and rendered it as a plural.

41 Ibid.

42 I would like to thank my colleague Haim Weiss for this term, which he coined for a figure who was strikingly similar to Porat. See Weiss, “The Mountain that Folds Within It.”

43 At the time, Porush (1916–2010) was the parliamentary leader of the Ultraorthodox Agudath Israel party.

44 For the version with Rabbi Lau, see https://www.hidabroot.org/article/1146164 (accessed February 24, 2023); for that with Rabbi Eliyahu, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGu3uyYAzJU&ab_channel=%D7%90%D7%99%D7%92%D7%95%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%A7%D7%94%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%AA (accessed February 24, 2023). Note that each of the three heroes confirmed that the story about him was true and repeated it on multiple occasions. I hope to write elsewhere about the meanings that emerge through the comparison of the different versions.

45 This account appears in several places as part of Porat’s life story. See, e.g., https://karovel.co.il/%D7%94%D7%9B%D7%AA%D7%91%D7%94-%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%9B%D7%96%D7%99%D7%AA/%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%9E%D7%A2-%D7%A8%D7%97%D7%9C/ (accessed February 24, 2023).

46 E. Rifkin “Rachel’s Tomb is Open thanks to Hanan Porat,” Arutz 7 website, Oct. 29, 2020, https://www.inn.co.il/news/455636 (accessed February 24, 2023). For a thoughtful discussion of the political efforts to retain Israeli control of Rachel’s Tomb and the road leading to it (which was also part of the main street of Palestinian Bethlehem), see, inter alia, Lehrs, “Political Holiness,” 236–7.

47 The reference is to what the Israel media designated the “Western Wall Tunnel Riots.” The violence erupted on 24 September 1996. The disturbances, continued for four days, with a death toll of 59 Palestinians and 16 IDF soldiers.

48 In his book, Nadav Shragai surveyed the opposition to the renovation, from the aesthetic, nostalgic, and practical sides. See Shragai, At the Crossroads, 215–26.

49 Nissim Hovav, in memory of Ariel Hovav, on the tenth anniversary of his death, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCksBgiPyPA&ab_channel=%D7%90%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%A4%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%92 (accessed February 27, 2023).

50 Freimann and Ben Shahar, Gate Opener, 159–64.

51 The Israel Defense Ministry’s memorial site: https://www.izkor.gov.il/%D7%90%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%90%D7%9C%20%D7%97%D7%95%D7%91%D7%91/en_2f0af9888c3567e81e48ae551a4e7092 (accessed February 28, 2023).

52 For a summary of the war, see “Israeli arsenal.”

53 There are several versions of the story in the IFA’s digital collection, with catalogue numbers 0001 to 0005. The story has already attracted scholarly attention: Rosman, “Typology of Battlefield Miracles” (https://www.mdpi.com/2077–1444/9/10/311). I have written further about the story in Rotman, “Father, Mother and Soldiers.”

54 In my article listed in the previous note, I wrote at greater length about the image of Rabbi Eliyahu and the Rachel Cult held by believers. Here I focus upon the specific elements of his character that are relevant to the present discussion.

55 Yad Katif website, “Operation Cast Lead: Our Mother Rachel Protects her Sons – Rabbi Eliyahu” (video clip, January 20, 2009: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGIf5rfsfdk, accessed November 8, 2021). The sermon was part of the rabbi’s weekly class at the synagogue in his neighborhood, Kiryat Moshe in Jerusalem. During Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu’s long illness his son, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, gave the class in his place.

56 Here I choose to follow in the footsteps of the basic and conservative definitions of Carl von Sydow, who distinguished memorate, a report on an individual experience, from fabulate, a story about an experience recounted by someone who heard about it from the protagonist. See von Sydow, Selected Papers on Folklore.

57 “Rachel Tomb and Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu (Video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWFveVmkXK4&ab_channel=%D7%9C%D7%A9%D7%9B%D7%AA%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%99%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%A3%D7%90%D7%9C%D7%A0%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%95%D7%94 (accessed June 9, 2023); I have elaborated on this story and its connection to actual events that took place during the 1967 war near the western wall in Rotman, “Father, Mother and Soldiers.”

58 See the organization’s website, https://keverrachel.net/ (last accessed March 9, 2023).

59 Mameh Rochel 24:2019, 30.