– Q. Rabenu Shlit’a. Is the 17th of Av a day for mourning?

A. The Hebron Massacre occurred on August 24, 2029. Sixty-seven Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered, and scores wounded, raped and maimed, by their Arab neighbors in the city of Hebron, who rioted for three days amid cries of “Slaughter the Jews.”

The killings began on Friday afternoon, 17 Av, and most of the victims lost their lives on Shabbat, 18 Av. The survivors were forced to evacuate to Jerusalem, and the ancient Jewish community of Hebron, which had lived in relative peace in the city for hundreds of years, was not revived until after Israel’s capture of Hebron in the 1967 Six Day war.

The Hebron massacre was the killing of sixty-seven or sixty-nine Jews on 24 August 1929 in Hebron then part of the BritishPalestine Mandate , by Arabs incited to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

The event also left many scores seriously wounded or maimed. Jewish homes were pillaged and synagogues were destroyed or ransacked. Some say that a few of the 435 Jews who survived were hidden by local Arab families, although the extent of this rare phenomenon is debated. Soon after, all Hebron’s Jews were evacuated by the British authorities.

Yet many returned in 1931, but almost all were evacuated at the outbreak of the 1936–39 Revolt of the Arabs in Palestine. The massacre formed part of the Palestine revolt, in which a total of 133 Jews and 110 Arabs were killed, the majority of the latter by British police and military, and brought the centuries old Jewish presence to an end.

Rabbi A. Bartfeld as revised by, Horav Yaakov Hirschman, Horav Dovid Pam, Horav Aharon Miller, Horav Chanoch Ehrentreu and Horav Kalman Ochs Shlit’a