Let us pray
Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis at the Kotel in Jerusalem on Wednesday
JERUSALEM WITNESSED a “unique moment” on Wednesday as Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, prayed together at the Western Wall.
It is thought to be the first time a British Chief Rabbi and the head of the Anglican church have made a joint visit to the city.
Rabbi Mirvis said: “It was a very special afternoon for me, to be able to walk through the Jewish quarter with the Archbishop, to show him memories of my own, where my wife and I lived for two years, and to live and breathe the Jewish history of the city, leading to the prayer together at the Kotel. It was,” the Chief Rabbi added, “a unique moment in history.”
Archbishop Welby is on a 10-day trip to Israel and Jordan, and had invited Rabbi Mirvis to join him in Jerusalem.
The two men visited Holy sites in the city and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
Rabbi Mirvis said: “The Archbishop of Canterbury’s presence here and his prayers for peace and reconciliation, particularly at Yad Vashem and the Western Wall, are indicative of historic, positive developments in the Anglican-Jewish relationship.”
At Yad Vashem, the Archbishop said people would have been expected to rise up in gratitude to those “who even in the last hundred years, gave us the greatest advances in science, won Nobel prizes, who in the arts and music were transformative, who refounded our economies and our finance. And yet, in the last year, we see uncovered even in England a fresh sense of antisemitism which must go so deeply into the root of our culture.”
Referring to the commitment of the British government to establish a Holocaust memorial near the Houses of Parliament, the Archbishop added: “Coming here today, I am reminded how important that is.”
Taking questions from journalists, Rabbi Mirvis was asked for his reaction to the Unesco resolution on Jerusalem, passed less than 24 hours earlier and seen widely as challenging Israel’s sovereignty over the city. He said he had stressed the Jewish connection to Jerusalem in conversation with the Archbishop and had showed him examples of Jewish roots in the city going back thousands of years.