June 5, 1952 Having been forced to evacuate its campus on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus after the massacre of 78 medical people April 13, 1948, Hadassah breaks ground on the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center at…
July 20, 1951 Abdullah I, the founding king of Jordan, is assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist at the al-Aqsa Mosque entrance in Jerusalem. The king’s bodyguards immediately shoot the assassin dead. Abdullah’s grandson, Hussein, succeeds…
June 20, 1950 Israel’s first Festival of Jewish Music begins in Jerusalem and runs until July 1. It is arranged by the Music Department of the Israeli government’s Ministry of Education and Culture and the…
Jordan formally annexes the West Bank and East Jerusalem, allowing the Palestinian inhabitants therein to obtain Jordanian citizenship.
By a vote of 60-2, with members of Mapam and Herut abstaining, the Knesset adopts a proclamation declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel.
December 5, 1949 Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declares in a Knesset speech that “Jewish Jerusalem is an organic, inseparable part of the state of Israel” and that Israel rejects any attempt by the United Nations…
June 1, 1948 A convoy passes along the new Burma Road from Kibbutz Hulda to bring supplies to Jerusalem for the first time. Under the direction of Gen. Mickey Marcus, an American Army veteran, the…
Two days after being established and placed under the command of twenty-four-year-old Yitzhak Rabin, the Harel Brigade organized a convoy of supplies to be brought to Jerusalem under fire from Arab irregulars.
April 1, 1948 Nine Jews are killed and 17 others are wounded in an unsuccessful attempt to move a 60-truck convoy of food and other supplies to Jerusalem through Wadi Sarrar, even though Haganah patrols…
Members of the Irgun, a Jewish military organization that is absorbed into the IDF during the 1948 War, bomb the British administrative headquarters in Palestine, based in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Twenty-eight British, forty-one Arabs, and seventeen Jews are killed.
Israeli author, journalist and intellectual Amos Oz is born as “Amos Klausner” in Jerusalem during the British Mandate.
The Mufti has enormous power in his hands, yet he chooses non-engagement with the British, who controlled Palestine.
The Jerusalem YMCA, still operational today, is opened by General Edmund Allenby in front of an overflow crowd.
Twenty-two women graduate from the Nurses’ Training Institute at Rothschild Hospital in Jerusalem. They are the first to receive nursing degrees in the Land of Israel.
A Muslim pilgrimage festival erupts into violence against Jews in Jerusalem, leaving nine dead and hundreds wounded.
British General Edmund Allenby appoints Ronald Storrs as Military Governor of Jerusalem.
Shmuel Katz, a leader of Revisionist Zionism and a founder of the Herut Party in Israel, is born in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Arthur Ruppin, head of the Palestine Office of the World Zionist Organization, purchases the estate of Sir John Gray Hill on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem for the purpose of building a university.
Teddy Kollek, Zionist leader and long-time mayor of Jerusalem, is born in Nagyvázsony, Hungary.
The first passenger train arrives in Jerusalem from Jaffa as part of the first railroad project in the Ottoman-controlled Levant, the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway line.
Following a siege that began on September 20, Jerusalem falls to Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt.
