The number is striking on its own: despite anti-Jewish restrictions that violate Israeli law, 35,000 Jews have already ascended the Temple Mount since the start of 2025. But what may prove even more significant than the numbers is who is now speaking. In recent weeks, two rabbinic voices not typically associated with the Temple Mount ascent movement have broken ranks with the institutional ban, making halachic (Jewish law) statements that are reverberating through synagogues, yeshivot (schools of learning), and political offices from Jerusalem to New York.
Rabbi Dr. Yitzchak Breitowitz, one of the most respected English-speaking Orthodox poskim (halachic decisors) in the world, has stated publicly that Jewish law not only permits ascent to large portions of Har HaBayit, but that a clearly identifiable “safe zone” exists for those who have immersed in a mikveh (ritual pool). And in the pages of the Amshinov Hasidic community newspaper Yirah Vesimcha, the Amshinover Rebbe, a figure from within the insular Haredi world that has most staunchly opposed ascending to the Temple Mount, ruled that a person who is impure from contact with the dead (tumat met) may legally enter the Temple Mount itself, restricted only from the cheil, the zone immediately surrounding the Temple’s inner courtyards.
The Halacha: What the Law Actually Says
The Torah commands in Leviticus: “Et mikdashi tira’u,” “You shall revere My sanctuary” (Leviticus 19:30). The Sages teach that this reverence is expressed not by staying away, but by approaching with proper awe and purity. The question is not whether Jews belong on Har HaBayit, as they unquestionably do, but under what halachic conditions ascent is permitted today, when the ashes of the Parah Adumah (red heifer), which purify from tumat met, are currently unavailable.
It must be understood that the Temple Mount is not one uniform zone of holiness. It is composed of concentric areas, each with a different level of sanctity and correspondingly different restrictions. The outermost area, and by far the largest, is called Machaneh Levia (the Camp of the Levites). A person impure from contact with the dead is forbidden from the cheil inward, specifically the Machaneh Shechina, the inner zone surrounding the Temple structure itself, where the Kodesh HaKodashim (Holy of Holies) stood. But the outer Machaneh Levia, the broad, expansive plaza of Har HaBayit, is permitted to such a person after mikveh immersion, according to the majority of halachic analysis.
This is the ruling Rabbi Breitowitz articulated in his recent lesson. He acknowledged his own personal stringency: “I myself have never been on the Har HaBayit. I don’t go to the Har HaBayit myself, and I am machmer (stringent).” But he was clear-eyed about the law: “In truth, we kind of do know. And we do have a kind of unbroken mesorah (tradition) that the Machaneh Shechina (‘Camp of the Divine Presence,’ where the holiest parts of the Temple stood) is located very close to the Dome of the Rock. The Dome of the Rock itself is on the site of the Holy of Holies. And if you then work backward in terms of measuring the Mikdash (Temple), you can determine it.” He added: “There’s absolutely a safe zone” where someone impure from tumat met is permitted to go.
The Amshinover Rebbe, speaking in his community’s newspaper, confirmed this analysis. When his son asked whether it is forbidden today to ascend the Temple Mount, the Rebbe replied: “A person who is impure from contact with the dead is permitted to enter the Temple Mount itself. Only the cheil, which is beyond the Temple Mount, is forbidden.” Immersion in a standard mikveh suffices for entry into the outer areas of the Mount. The Rebbe also noted that the Western Wall (the Kotel) is connected to the wall of the Temple Mount itself, as brought in Kaftor Vaferach, chapter 6, and that “the Temple Mount is not the Temple courtyard. The Temple Mount is the Camp of the Levites.” Entry to its beginning, after proper immersion, is permitted.
The Amshinover Rebbe, it should be noted, joins a growing list of Haredi rabbis who have addressed the issue with increasing seriousness, including Rabbi Dov Kook, Rabbi Daniel Stavsky, Rabbi Mendel Tobias, Rabbi Yitzchak Brand, and rabbis Tikochinsky, Frank, Zilberman, and Rosenthal.
The Broader Rabbinic Landscape
The institutional ban on Temple Mount ascent issued by the official Chief Rabbinate rests on two arguments: first, that the precise location of the Holy of Holies is unknown; and second, that without the ashes of the Parah Adumah (red heifer), no Jew can achieve the level of purity required to enter the holier zones. The ban reflects a genuine Haredi instinct toward caution in matters of severe biblical transgression, and entering the forbidden zones carries the punishment of karet (spiritual excision).
But the ban rests on a premise that is simply not accurate. The location of the Kodesh HaKodashim is, in fact, knowable and has been mapped with precision.
Among the Religious Zionist rabbinate, many of the major halachic authorities have permitted ascent under strict halachic conditions: Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Yaakov Medan, Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, and Rabbi Zalman Baruch Melamed. The late Rabbi Shlomo Goren, who served as Chief Rabbi of Israel and Chief Rabbi of the IDF, was the most important figure in establishing the halachic and cartographic basis for ascent, and his position, as clarified by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, deserves extended treatment.
Rabbi Goren’s Warning: Sovereignty and Halacha
The story of Rabbi Goren and the Temple Mount is one of the most consequential and suppressed chapters in the history of the State of Israel.
Immediately after the liberation of the Temple Mount in June 1967, Rabbi Goren, then serving as Chief Rabbi of the IDF, ordered the IDF Engineering Corps to conduct precise topographical mapping of the entire Temple Mount complex. Using those maps, he definitively established which areas of the Mount were forbidden and which were part of the much larger Machaneh Levia and were therefore entirely permitted to Jews who had immersed in a mikveh.
Armed with this research, Rabbi Goren publicly announced a mass, celebratory prayer service to be held on the Temple Mount in the permitted zones before the Shabbat following Tisha B’Av in 1967. The prayer was canceled by direct order of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. Within days, the ministerial committee ordered that Rabbi Goren was not to organize any further prayers on the Temple Mount.
The decision devastated Rabbi Goren. He wrote a long letter to the ministerial committee demanding to know how it was possible that at the holiest Jewish site on earth, Jews were forbidden to pray. He concluded the letter with a cry: “Distinguished men! Save the Holy of Holies of the Jewish nation; do not hand over the Temple Mount to those who defile it.”
His appeal was ignored. Moshe Dayan made the decision that will shadow his legacy forever: he transferred the administration of Har HaBayit to the Muslim Waqf and ordered the Military Rabbinate to evacuate the Mount entirely. Rabbi Goren responded, in his words, “with rage and sorrow,” warning Dayan directly: “This, God forbid, could lead to the destruction of the Third Temple, for the key to our sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and Gaza is the Temple Mount.”
Writing in his book Har HaBayit, published a year before his death in 1994, during the Rabin government that was negotiating with the PLO, Rabbi Goren made the political dimension of his halachic ruling explicit: “Currently, when Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount is in danger, Mount Moriah is liable to become the subject of negotiation between us and the Arabs, and unfortunately, there are politicians who are willing to negotiate our sovereignty over the Temple Mount, relying on the alleged prohibition of the Chief Rabbinate to enter Har HaBayit. This prohibition is liable to be used as an excuse to hand over the nation’s Kodesh HaKodashim (Holy of Holies) to the Muslims. Therefore, I decided to publish the book now, from which it will be proven that there are large areas of the Temple Mount which all Jews are permitted to enter, according to all halachic opinions, after immersion in a mikveh.”
This is the sentence that every politician and every rabbi who invokes the Chief Rabbinate ban must reckon with. Rabbi Goren saw with prophetic clarity what he called “one of the most shameful acts in the history of Israel” — the handing of the Mount to the Waqf — and he understood that the Chief Rabbinate’s ban was being weaponized against Jewish sovereignty. He wrote: “Had they closed the Temple Mount to Jews and non-Jews alike, I would have kept quiet, but to allow the Arabs to do there as they please while Jews are forbidden to even open up a Book of Psalms and pour out their hearts before the Creator of the world — this is a religious, historical, and legal scandal — nothing short of blasphemy.”
Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, Rosh Yeshiva of Har Bracha and one of the foremost halachic authorities of the Religious Zionist world, writing on the legacy of Rabbi Goren, laid out the conclusion bluntly: “We must utilize to the fullest all sides of the heter (rabbinic permission), so we can demonstrate continuous Jewish presence there, and maintain Jewish sovereignty over the Mount, like the apple of our eye.” Rabbi Melamed added his own assessment: “The continuation of the disgraceful situation on the Temple Mount brings our enemies hope, and motivates them to kill and riot throughout the country.” And regarding those who do ascend according to halacha: “Blessed are those who go up to Har HaBayit, but only if that is done according to halacha. Thanks to them, our sovereignty over the Temple Mount and all of the Land of Israel becomes clearer.”
Rabbi Goren himself had stated that the prayers at the Western Wall, as meaningful as they are to millions of Jews, represent, historically speaking, “a symbol of destruction and exile, and not of liberation and redemption,” since Jews only began praying at the Kotel in the sixteenth century. For centuries before that, the Sages prayed on Har HaBayit in the permitted zones. The Shechina (Divine Presence) referenced in the Midrash as never having left the “Western Wall” refers, Rabbi Goren argued, to the western wall of the azara (Temple courtyard), not the retaining wall of the mount that tourists visit today.
The Prayer Ban: A Monopoly Enforced by Israeli Police
Here is where the situation becomes not merely an internal Jewish halachic debate, but a matter of Israeli law and a national disgrace.
Israel’s Protection of Holy Places Law of 1967 mandates the protection of holy sites and guarantees freedom of access to them for all religious groups. Israeli Basic Law enshrines freedom of religion and conscience. Israel’s Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled since 1993 that Jews have the right to pray on the Temple Mount as part of freedom of religion and expression. The court has, however, allowed police to restrict this right in the name of public order, a loophole that has swallowed the law entirely, becoming the police rulebook on enforcing a racist “status quo”.
Under understandings reached after Israel captured the Old City and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, Jews are allowed to visit but not pray at the site. Israel maintains overall security, but the Muslim Waqf administers religious activities there. For decades, police have enforced the Jewish prayer ban as a public security measure.
Overt acts of Jewish prayer, such as forming prayer groups, wearing tefillin (phylacteries), or bowing and swaying during prayer, are prohibited. Jewish prayer is confined to the nearby Western Wall.
Tragically, this ban does not apply only to Jews. Christians are equally banned from praying on the Temple Mount. An evangelical Christian who travels from Texas or Georgia to stand on the site where Solomon’s Temple stood, where Isaiah prophesied, where the Shechina dwells — that Christian cannot so much as bow his head in silent prayer without risking detention by Israeli police. The Israeli government enforces, at the holiest site in Judaism and one of the most significant sites in Christianity, an absolute Muslim monopoly on prayer.
This is the site that the Prophet Isaiah described in words that still echo across millennia: “Ki veiti beit tefila yikare lechol ha’amim,” “For My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7). All peoples. The actions of the Israeli police are preventing this prophecy from manifesting.
The tragic irony is that in the Jewish state, in the Jewish capital, at the holiest Jewish site, Jewish and Christian prayer are banned, while Muslim prayer proceeds without restriction.
Temple Mount Administration director Rabbi Shimshon Elboim welcomed Rabbi Breitowitz’s recent remarks, saying: “Every additional rabbi who encourages ascending the Temple Mount brings Israel’s return to the Temple Mount, the renewal of the Temple service, and the building of the Temple in its place closer.” He welcomed the Amshinover Rebbe’s published words with equal enthusiasm, calling them “a major step forward in the Jewish progress of Israel’s return to the Temple Mount.”
The Administration also noted that Israeli police currently permit a short route near the entrance from the Mughrabi Gate, allowing visitors to walk close to the Western Wall from the inside and exit immediately, a route that falls within the halachically permitted zones according to the authorities who permit ascent. The Temple Mount is open for Jewish visits only on Sunday through Tuesday this week, as the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, beginning Wednesday, shuts out Jewish access entirely.
The Hamas Symbol and the Dome of the Rock
In a painful reminder that the Temple Mount has been hijacked by the worst forces of evil, at the center of the Hamas logo sits the Dome of the Rock, surrounded by Palestinian flags bearing the phrases “There is no god but Allah” and “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” Beneath the Dome are two crossed swords, a common Islamic motif representing the power of Islam and the willingness to spread it by force if necessary. The swords in the foreground are directed against Israel and signify a willingness to destroy the Israelis, conquer their land, and impose Islamic beliefs by force. Above all of it is the outline of a “Palestinian state” occupying the entire territory of Israel.
Their symbol tells the whole story: the site of the Jewish Temple, the site that God designated as His dwelling place among the Jewish people, flanked by swords pointed at Jews. The Hamas terrorist organization’s genocidal war against the Jewish people is not incidental to Har HaBayit; it is centered on it. The Dome of the Rock is their banner. The Temple Mount is their stated prize.
What makes this all the more remarkable is what Dr. Mordechai Kedar, senior lecturer in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University and one of Israel’s foremost scholars of Islamic culture, has demonstrated through rigorous textual and historical analysis: the Temple Mount is not, in any authentic sense, holy to Islam at all.
Early Islamic sources state that “al-Masjid al-Aqsa” — the “farther mosque” — mentioned only once in the Quran, was one of two mosques located near Ji’irrana, a village between Mecca and Ta’if in the Arabian Peninsula. One mosque was called “al-Masjid al-Adna,” the “closer mosque,” and the other “al-Masjid al-Aqsa,” the “farther mosque.”
Fifty years after the death of Muhammad, in 682 CE, Abd Allah Ibn al-Zubayr revolted against the Umayyad Dynasty ruling in Damascus. He closed the roads and prevented Damascus residents from making the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Having no other choice, the Umayyads chose Jerusalem as an alternative Hajj destination. To entrench their choice of Jerusalem, they invented the story that the al-Aqsa Mosque mentioned in the Quran was not in Ju’ranah but in Jerusalem. They linked the story to the Quranic myth about Muhammad’s night flight to al-Aqsa Mosque by inventing a number of hadiths that essentially rewrite history.
To justify choosing Jerusalem, the Umayyads rewrote the story told in the Quran, relocating the al-Aqsa mosque to Jerusalem and adding the myth of Mohammed’s nighttime journey to al-Aqsa. Today, this narrative has been revived and advanced by the Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey’s President Erdogan, Qatar, and other Islamist movements seeking to unite Muslims under a caliphate and use Jerusalem as a crown, as Kedar has explained.
Jerusalem does not appear in the Quran, and the second Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, a peer of Mohammed, did not refer to the Temple Mount as a holy place for Islam or as having importance to the Prophet Mohammed. Ironically, while emphasizing that the land of Israel belongs to the “sons of Abraham” (i.e., the Jews). The term Palestinian was coined by the Greek Herodotus in the 5th century BCE and does not appear in the Koran.
The false narrative of a Muslim connection to Judaism’s holiest site has taken over the media and paralyzed policy for decades. The Israeli government has adopted the demands of pro-Palestinian foreign governments that parrot the false history, demanding that Jews vacate their holiest site to protect Muslim religious sensitivities. The Palestinian claim is deeply insulting to most Muslims and is built on a medieval political fabrication, not on authentic Islamic theology. Saudi scholars and journalists have said as much publicly in recent years. The “holiness” of Jerusalem to Sunni Islam is a Umayyad political invention, weaponized in the twentieth century by the Muslim Brotherhood and its offspring, including Hamas.
Hamas knows this. Their use of the Dome of the Rock as a symbol of jihad is not an expression of genuine religious devotion to a sacred site. It is a territorial declaration. It is a statement that the place where God chose to dwell among the Jewish people, Har HaBayit, the house of the God of Israel, is their target.
The Stakes
Rabbi Goren saw this clearly in 1994 when he wrote that the Chief Rabbinate’s ban was being used as a pretext to hand Har HaBayit to Israel’s enemies. The situation has not improved in the three decades since. The Waqf routinely destroys archaeological evidence of Jewish presence on the Mount. Muslims riot when Jews ascend. Israeli police enforce the violence-backed veto. And every time a Jew is detained at the site of the Beit HaMikdash, the message sent across the Arab world is that Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem is a fiction.
The Amshinover Rebbe did not ascend the Temple Mount. Rabbi Breitowitz has not ascended the Temple Mount. But both have now said, in careful halachic language, what the law of the Torah actually requires: that there are zones on Har HaBayit where Jews are permitted to go, that the prohibition of the Chief Rabbinate is not as absolute as presented, and that the mesorahm the unbroken tradition, places the Kodesh HaKodashim precisely beneath the Dome of the Rock, leaving the vast majority of the Mount accessible to a Jew who has immersed in a mikveh.
The number of 35,000 Jews ascending Har HaBayit so far this year will grow. The halachic consensus is shifting. And as Rabbi Goren warned a generation ago and Rabbi Melamed confirmed, every Jew who ascends in accordance with halacha is not merely performing a religious act. He is performing a sovereign act. He is saying, in the language that all nations understand, that Har HaBayit shelanu, the Temple Mount is ours.
The prophet Micah saw it: “Vehalchu goyim rabim ve’amru lechu vena’aleh el har Hashem,” “And many nations shall go and say: Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord” (Micah 4:2). The mountain of the Lord. Not the mountain of the Waqf. Not the mountain of Hamas. The mountain of the Lord.
The gates are not yet fully open. But they are opening.
