Jerusalem of Gold

“Jerusalem of Gold” brings biblical, Talmudic, and medieval Jewish references into a modern song about attachment to Jerusalem.[5][6] Its original verses center on longing, absence, and separation from the Old City, while the added final verse transforms those themes into a declaration of return.[7] The work consequently preserves two closely connected moments in Israeli experience: the yearning that preceded the Six-Day War and the celebration that followed Jerusalem’s reunification.[7][3]

The song originated as a commissioned contribution to the noncompetitive portion of the 1967 Israel Song Festival, rather than as an entry competing for a prize.[8] Its public importance quickly exceeded that setting: Nathan’s debut prompted an encore, soldiers sang it during the war, and the revised version became associated with renewed Jewish access to Jerusalem’s holy places.[2][9]

Although its imagery draws extensively on Jewish religious and literary traditions, the song also belongs to the development of modern Israeli popular culture represented by the festival.[8][6] Its performance history connects a municipal commission, an initially little-known young singer, wartime experiences, and later national commemorations.[1][9] The distinction between its original and expanded texts remains central to its meaning: the earlier images of deserted places are answered by a later stanza describing people returning to those same locations.[7]

In 1967, Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek commissioned five songs about the city for the noncompetitive portion of the Voice of Israel Song Festival, with Naomi Shemer among the composers approached.[8] Established in 1960 as part of Israel’s Independence Day celebrations, the festival was intended to showcase emerging Israeli culture.[8] Kollek’s request reached Shemer through festival editor and producer Gil Aldema.[10]

Shemer remembered considerable difficulty in finding a way to fulfill the assignment.[8] She recalled struggling for two months and asking Aldema to release her from the commission before the phrase “Jerusalem of Gold” suddenly supplied the idea around which she could build the song.[8] In her recollection, the words appeared in her memory “as if to say, ‘Here I am,’” and became the composition’s “cornerstone.”[8]

The title came from a Talmudic story Shemer remembered from school about Rabbi Akiva and his wife Rachel.[9] In the story, Akiva, poor and living with Rachel in a hayloft, promises to buy her a “Jerusalem of Gold,” a piece of jewelry depicting Jerusalem.[8][9] Shemer recalled remembering the story and writing the song that night.[8] The phrase thus joined the image of the city to an intimate promise of affection already embedded in Jewish tradition.[8][9]

Her account of writing also emphasized memories of Jerusalem itself.[9] She began at night with recollections of summer visits, moving from remembered experiences toward an image of the city sitting alone and captive in a dream.[9] Those personal memories formed part of the composition alongside the older literary sources that gave the title and lyrics their historical depth.[9][6]

Shemer described the melody in relation to several musical traditions familiar to her: Hasidic melodies, Yiddish songs sung by her father, and faint traces of biblical cantillation.[9] She likened the rising refrain to the successive ascents of the old road near Moza, called the “Seven Sisters,” on the approach to Jerusalem.[9] In that description, the refrain’s upward movement was connected to the physical experience of traveling toward the city.[9]

The Old City verse developed after Shemer played the emerging song for visitors, including her friend Rivka Michaeli.[9] Michaeli asked what place the Old City had in the song, prompting Shemer to add a middle verse.[9] Shemer explained that she did not approach that passage as a description limited to the preceding nineteen years; instead, she set aside tangible contemporary details and thought in terms of the two thousand years since the Destruction.[9] The resulting text placed the immediate division of Jerusalem within a much longer Jewish historical frame.[9]

The circumstances of the commission also shaped the choice of performer.[10] Rather than entrust the song to an established star, Shemer insisted on Shuli Nathan, whom she had heard singing on the radio.[9][10] Festival management preferred a better-known singer, but Shemer maintained her choice and also insisted that Nathan perform with guitar rather than orchestral accompaniment.[9][10]

Shuli Nathan first performed “Jerusalem of Gold” publicly on May 15, 1967, at Jerusalem’s Binyanei HaUma, the International Convention Center, approximately three weeks before the Six-Day War.[10][11] The performance belonged to the festival’s noncompetitive program, so the song’s immediate success did not depend on winning the contest.[8] Its debut took place within the Independence Day festival setting that had prompted Kollek’s commission.[8][10]

Nathan was then a twenty-year-old soldier-teacher.[10] She had begun singing and playing guitar at sixteen and had participated in radio programs before Shemer discovered her.[12] One of those appearances was on the program “First Applause.”[10] Her selection brought a relatively unknown young performer before the festival audience with a newly written song that would rapidly establish her public identity.[1][12]

Accompanying herself on guitar, Nathan presented the song in the form Shemer had requested.[9] The performance stirred powerful and unexpected emotion among listeners.[2] Nathan later recalled an initial silence followed by sustained applause from an audience of about 2,000.[10] After she had left the stage, Kollek summoned her back to sing it again.[2]

The audience’s response continued beyond the first performance.[13] At the end of the evening, pressure from the crowd and Kollek brought Nathan back for an encore, and listeners joined in the refrain.[13] When she returned for the encore, the audience was already able to join in the refrain.[9][13] Shemer’s recollection likewise describes people standing and demanding another performance after the festival prizes had been awarded.[9]

The success marked an important beginning for Nathan’s career.[12] Her performance of Shemer’s song rapidly made her a well-known Israeli folk singer.[12] The song itself was already being sung before the outbreak of war, rather than becoming popular only as a retrospective celebration of victory.[5] Its first reception therefore belonged to a period of longing and uncertainty, before the events that would lead Shemer to expand its text.[2][5]

On June 6, 1967, soldier Aharon Bar-Oz wrote to Shemer that “Jerusalem of Gold” had become part of life at his unit’s outposts and that soldiers kept singing it while the country was at war.[11][14] The postcard provides a contemporary instance of the song’s adoption within military life, before its later reputation as an unofficial anthem had fully developed.[11] Shemer answered nine days later, expressing pleasure that she had been able to help the unit “at least through song.”[11]

The exchange continued beyond the first postcard and reply.[14] Shemer’s response expressed happiness at the unit’s victory and at the song’s ability to encourage the soldiers from afar.[14] The correspondence was preserved in her archive, and Bar-Oz’s family later supplied his subsequent reply to the National Library of Israel.[14] These letters connect the song’s public wartime role with a direct exchange between its composer and an individual listener serving at an outpost.[11][14]

Paratroopers sang the song after reaching the Western Wall, and it was also sung on the Temple Mount.[9] A surviving 1967 radio recording features Nathan performing with Israel Defense Forces soldiers.[15] These performances associated the original song of longing with the places whose inaccessibility had helped give its lyrics their emotional force.[1][9]

After Israeli forces captured the Old City, Shemer added a fourth verse that answered the mournful second stanza.[9][16] The new words announced a return to the cisterns, market, and square, and described a shofar sounding on the Temple Mount.[7] A verse that had imagined absence was thus answered within the song itself by a verse celebrating renewed presence.[9][7]

Several recollections connect the addition closely to Shemer’s performances for soldiers.[9][16] Singer Shashi Keshet remembered her writing the new stanza on paper while traveling with the Nahal troupe after hearing a radio announcement that the Old City had been captured.[16] Kollek also wrote to her in June 1967 that soldiers and Jerusalem residents were singing the song, and asked for an encouraging verse following the change in the city’s borders.[16]

When Shemer sang the revised version to paratroopers, she told them that changing a song was much easier than changing a city.[9] The expanded text became the form in which the work could express both its original yearning and the experience of Jerusalem’s reunification.[1][7] The final stanza also celebrated the opening of the road to Jericho, extending the geography of return beyond the Old City’s central holy sites.[17]

The refrain addresses Jerusalem through images of precious material, light, and musical devotion: “Jerusalem of gold / And of bronze, and of light / Behold I am a violin for all your songs.”[7] The speaker’s relationship to the city is expressed through the role of an instrument sounding Jerusalem’s songs.[7] This musical image belongs alongside the song’s broader use of older Jewish literary language and its association with the medieval poet Judah Halevi.[5][6]

The lyrics draw together references from distinct periods of Jewish history.[6] The title recalls Rabbi Akiva’s promised ornament, while other language invokes the Babylonian exiles’ oath not to forget Jerusalem and Halevi’s image of being a harp for the city’s songs.[6] Biblical and Talmudic concepts appear together with the medieval poetry of longing for Zion.[5] These references give the modern song a vocabulary of attachment reaching far beyond the circumstances of its 1967 composition.[5][6]

The original second stanza has a particularly mournful character.[5] Its use of “Eikha” recalls the opening word of Lamentations, and its imagery includes dried-up wells.[5] The text also depicts dry cisterns, an empty marketplace, and the absence of visitors to the Temple Mount in the Old City.[7] These places are presented through what is missing from them, making separation from Jerusalem central to the song’s emotional world.[7]

The divided city also appears through the image of a “wall” in Jerusalem’s heart.[7] That image refers to the border separating the Israeli- and Jordanian-controlled parts of the city before the Six-Day War.[6] The geographical separation had a direct religious dimension: Jews could not enter the Jordanian-controlled Old City to worship at their holy places.[1] The song’s longing consequently joined a long historical attachment to the specific experience of inaccessible sites.[1][6]

The added verse reverses the earlier stanza’s images rather than abandoning them.[7] Where the original text described dry cisterns and an empty market, the later text declares, “We have returned to the cisterns / To the market and to the market-place.”[7] The Temple Mount, formerly described through absence, becomes the setting for a ram’s horn sounding in the Old City.[7]

The revised song therefore retains the language of loss while adding its answer in the language of return.[1][7] Its two emotional registers are preserved within one work: the earlier verses continue to voice yearning, while the last verse expresses triumph following reunification.[1] The historical and literary references remain the same framework through which both experiences are articulated.[5][6]

Nathan’s guitar-accompanied debut remained the song’s foundational performance, but dozens of other performers subsequently sang it.[9][3] Its documented early performance settings include the festival stage, military outposts where soldiers sang it themselves, a radio recording with Nathan and IDF soldiers, and Shemer’s appearances before troops.[9][15][11] The song moved between formal presentation and collective singing almost immediately, as the audience’s participation in the first encore already demonstrated.[9][13]

Its circulation also extended into translation.[18] Shemer’s personal archive, held in the National Library of Israel’s Music Department, contains the original words and musical score, related letters, and translations, including an Esperanto translation dating to 1967.[18] An English translation has also been published alongside the Hebrew lyrics.[7] The archival material preserves both the composition itself and evidence of the different ways people encountered and transmitted it.[18]

The surviving correspondence and recordings complement the written text.[15][14] Nathan’s 1967 recording with soldiers preserves an early performance context, while the Bar-Oz letters show how an individual military unit incorporated the song into daily life during the war.[15][14] Together with the original score and translations, these materials document the work as a written composition, a performed song, and a shared wartime cultural experience.[18][15][14]

In 1998, during Israel’s fiftieth-anniversary year, “Jerusalem of Gold” won first place in the “Hit of the Hits” parade and was selected as the Jubilee song.[9] This recognition came more than three decades after Nathan’s first performance and reinforced the song’s enduring position in Israeli musical culture.[9] Its popularity was therefore not confined to the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War.[9]

The song became a national symbol after the war and was widely regarded as an unofficial national anthem of the period.[10] Its association with collective Jewish attachment to Jerusalem also extended beyond Israel; Jeffrey K. Salkin recalled it as a mainstay of American Jewish camping in the early 1970s.[4] The work’s national role rested on a combination of its immediate public success, its wartime adoption, and the transformation of its text following the capture of the Old City.[10][11]

Its anthem-like status even produced a proposal to change Israel’s official anthem.[10] Knesset member Uri Avnery proposed making “Jerusalem of Gold” the national anthem in place of “Hatikvah.”[10] The proposal illustrates how far a song commissioned for a festival’s noncompetitive program had traveled into the sphere of national symbolism.[8][10]

The work’s impact was closely connected to the contrast between its timing and its later associations.[19] Written before the war, it first gave voice to longing; when war broke out about three weeks after the debut, its existing emotional force acquired added poignancy.[19] The final verse then supplied a celebratory conclusion without removing the earlier verses that had captivated listeners.[1][7]

Its imagery also permitted different emphases in understanding the song.[19][4] It could express Jewish historical and religious attachment through its ancient references while functioning as a modern secular national song.[6][19] Nathan’s performance helped establish her career, while Shemer’s composition became one of her best-known works.[1][12] The song’s prominence thus joined an individual artistic achievement to a wider expression of Jewish memory and Israeli national experience.[12][6]

The melody’s relationship to the Basque folk song “Pello Joxepe” became a significant controversy.[20] Shortly before her death, Shemer wrote to Gil Aldema that she had probably heard the tune from singer Nechama Hendel in the mid-1960s and that it had entered her composition unconsciously.[20] She called the episode an “unfortunate work accident,” describing the influence as unwitting rather than deliberate.[20] She had previously rejected the suggested influence, while music researcher Eliyahu Hacohen had identified the Basque song as a possible source.[20]

The portrayal of an empty marketplace has also attracted criticism because Arabs lived in the places described.[16] In a 2015 personal essay, Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger argued that the imagery rendered Arab residents invisible.[21] Shemer’s own explanation placed the verse in an abstract historical frame extending back to the Destruction, rather than treating it as a literal account of the preceding nineteen years.[9] The dispute concerns how that poetic perspective relates to the city’s contemporary inhabitants.[16][21]

Political interpretations likewise differ. The song has given voice to Jewish longing, while Jeffrey K. Salkin described it as carrying “right-wing connotations.”[1][4] Paratrooper Meir Ariel’s 1967 “Jerusalem of Iron” supplied an early response, setting lyrics about the fighting to Shemer’s melody.[16] These responses form part of the song’s reception without erasing its original role as an expression of attachment to Jerusalem.[1][16]