The Yom Kippur War
Egypt and Syria attacked on the holiest day of the year, while the country stood in synagogue; 2,656 were killed in three weeks.
On 10 Tishrei 5734, at two in the afternoon, with the synagogues full and the country fasting, the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal and the Syrians struck the Golan. Intelligence knew of the build-up but did not believe an attack would come—the fatal certainty later called ha-konceptzia.
Mobilisation was announced in the middle of Yom Kippur: men rose and left in the midst of prayer, and drivers who never drive on that day carried reservists to the front. The first two days were a disaster. On the Golan the 7th Armoured Brigade, about a hundred tanks, held against some 500 Syrian tanks—Syria threw about 1,400 onto the Golan in all—at the place still called the Valley of Tears. In the south the Bar-Lev line fell almost at once.
Within a week the tide turned. Ariel Sharon's division crossed the canal at Deversoir and encircled the Egyptian Third Army; in the north the road to Damascus lay open. The cost was terrible: 2,656 dead, thousands wounded, hundreds captured.
The war shattered the confidence born in 5727. The Agranat Commission exposed the failures of command and Golda Meir resigned. In the religious world those same years began a wave of teshuvah—return to tradition—among men who had fought.
How we know
Sources
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Yoma 82a–85b (saving life on Yom Kippur) — why mobilisation on the holiest day — the halakhah itself
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Meshiv Milchamah, Rabbi Shlomo Goren — the military halakhah of those weeks
Documents of the period
- the Agranat Commission report — the intelligence failure and the course of the war — the state inquiry
Scholarship
- HaMaalot miMaamakim, Rabbi Yehudah Amital — theology after the war — the voice of a rosh yeshiva
Basis: tradition.
People and places
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef · Golda Meir · Yitzhak Rabin · Rabbi Yehuda Amital