The Man Who Smuggled a Shofar And Blew It in the Face of an Empire

There was a year when blowing a ram's horn at the Western Wall could get you thrown in a British prison, and one young man did it anyway.

This historic photograph captures Chief Military Rabbi Shlomo Goren blowing a shofar at the Western Wall (Kotel) in Jerusalem immediately following its reunification during the Six-Day War in June 1967.

Segal was a young religious man with fire in his chest and a stubborn love for his people that would not sit down and behave. On that Yom Kippur, watching the police watch the crowd, he made a quiet decision. He walked over to Rabbi Yitzchak Horenstein and asked, without quite asking, for the shofar resting near the prayer stand. The rabbi only glanced at it. That look was all the permission Segal needed.

He slipped the shofar under a borrowed tallit and pulled the wool over his head. Years later he described what he felt in that hidden little tent of prayer, and his words still send a shiver through anyone who reads them. Under this tallit, he said, he was under no dominion except that of his Father in Heaven. The prayers reached their peak. The final words rang out. And Moshe Segal lifted the horn to his lips and blew.

One blast that shook a mandate

The sound tore across the plaza. Tekiah gedolah, the great long blast that tells every Jewish soul that the gates of heaven are closing and the fast is done. For one instant the crowd was electrified. Then the police were on him. They dragged him off to the Kishleh, the grim prison just inside the Old City walls, and locked him up like a criminal for the crime of sounding a ram's horn on Yom Kippur.

But here the story turns, because Segal was not alone. Word raced through the alleys of Jerusalem to the students of Mercaz HaRav, and from them to the towering figure of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the land. Rav Kook had just finished his own fast. And when he heard that a young man sat in a British cell for blowing the shofar at the Kotel, he refused to eat. A great sage, drained from a day without food or water, would not lift a morsel to his mouth while a Jew was imprisoned for that. He sent his demand to the office of the High Commissioner himself. Release him. The pressure worked. At the stroke of midnight, the gates opened and Moshe Segal walked free.

Rabbi Dr. Abraham I. Kook (Wikimedia)

The blast that would not die

The British thought they had made an example. Instead they lit a torch. Every single Yom Kippur after that, year after year after year, some fearless young Jew would smuggle a shofar to the Wall and blow it at the end of Ne'ila, knowing full well what waited for them. Some were beaten. Some were jailed. None of them stopped. For close to two decades, right up until the War of Independence, that forbidden blast rang out over the stones as an act of pure defiance and pure faith. Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel live, and they will be heard at their own wall.

And then came the day that Segal must have dreamed of a thousand times. When our paratroopers broke through to the Old City and the cry went up that the Temple Mount was in our hands, Har Habayit b'yadenu, the Wall was ours again. No empire stood between a Jew and the stones his grandparents wept for. And Moshe Segal, older now, went back to that same plaza, lifted a shofar, and blew it in the open air with nobody left to arrest him. What was once a whispered crime had become the anthem of a free people at home.

He died on Yom Kippur, of all days, the very day he had made his own. There is a whole Torah in that.

We tend to think our story was won by armies and treaties, and much of it was. But some of it was won by a boy under a prayer shawl who decided that no government on earth gets to tell a Jew he cannot cry out to Hashem at the wall of his fathers. Kol Yisrael arevim ze bazeh, all of Israel are responsible for one another, and a sage proved it by refusing to eat until a stranger went free.

Next time you hear the shofar close out Yom Kippur, remember there was a stretch of years when that sound was contraband, and remember who paid to keep it alive. The stones of the Kotel have heard our prayers and our tears for thousands of years. For one strange chapter they were told to stay silent. Thanks to Moshe Segal and everyone who followed him, they never did. Am Yisrael Chai.