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To: Squidpup
...the lack of certainty as to the exact location of the Biblically-forbidden areas on the mount.

Huh?

2 posted on 05/18/2007 9:00:30 AM PDT by Lurking in Kansas (Nothing witty here... move on.)
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To: Lurking in Kansas

I think this refers to the location of where the Ark of the Covenant was stored.


3 posted on 05/18/2007 9:04:15 AM PDT by massgopguy (I owe everything to George Bailey)
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To: Lurking in Kansas

Here’s a section from Wikipedia that may answer your question...

Jewish religious law concerning entry to the site

Christian sources from the Byzantine period recorded that when Jews were allowed to visit the Temple ruins, they would anoint the rock. According to Islamic tradition, immediately after its construction, five Jewish families from Jerusalem were employed to clean the Dome of the Rock and to prepare wicks for its lamps.

The earliest known mention of a rabbinic prohibition on Jews entering the Temple Mount appears in a letter from Jerusalem by Rabbi Obadia da Bartinoro to his father in 1488, i.e., during the Mamluk period.

Rabbinical consensus in both the Religious Zionist and the Haredi Orthodox streams of Orthodox holds that it is forbidden for Jews to enter the Temple Mount. Many rabbis have issued prohibitions against entering the Temple Mount because of the danger of entering the area of the Temple courtyard and the difficulty of fulfilling the ritual requirement of cleansing oneself with the ashes of a red heifer (see Numbers 19), and declared it punishable with karet, death by heavenly decree.

The boundaries of the areas which are completely forbidden, while having large portions in common, are delineated differently by various rabbinic authorities. Some rabbis, primarily belonging to right-wing Religious Zionism, disagree with the majority position and maintain that it is permitted and even commendable to visit those parts of the Temple Mount which according to most medieval rabbinic authorities do not lead to any controversy, even though rabbinical consensus nowadays maintains that the entire Temple Mount including those areas is off-limits to Jews.

In May 2007, a group of Modern Orthodox right-wing Religious Zionist rabbis entered the Temple Mount.This elicited widespread criticism from other religious Jews and from secular Israelis, accusing the rabbis of provocating the Arabs. An editorial in the newspaper Haaretz accused the rabbis of ‘knowingly and irresponsibly bringing a burning torch closer to the most flammable hill in the Middle East,’ and noted that rabbinical consensus in both the Haredi and the Religious Zionist worlds forbids Jews from entering the Temple Mount.

On May 16, Rabbi Avraham Shapiro, former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel and rosh yeshiva of the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, reiterated that it is forbidden for Jews to enter the Temple Mount.

The Litvish Haredi newspaper Yated Ne’eman, which is controlled by leading Litvish Haredi rabbis including Rabbi Yosef Sholom Eliashiv and Rabbi Nissim Karelitz, accused the rabbis of transgressing a decree punishable by ‘death through the hands of heaven,’ an issur koreis in (Ashkenazi) Hebrew.


6 posted on 05/18/2007 9:12:54 AM PDT by MplsSteve
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