80,000

Eighty Thousand.


That is the official estimate by the police of how many people attended the Birkat Kohanim ceremony at the Kotel yesterday. 80,000 Jews in one place at one time. That is a lot of people.

It is so many people in fact, that they say this was the largest and greatest attended Birkat Kohanim event since the Kotel was recaptured in 1967 by Israel. The police say that it was so crowded that they had to close the gates of entry to the Kotel at one point because it was too full and would be dangerous to let more people in. Overflow crowd had to stand outside of the walls and gates of the Kotel area.

And I was part of it. One person out of 80,000.

And I even got to shake a funky Yemenite Etrog while I was there. In the picture it is not me shaking (I was clicking the shot), but that is the Esrog I borrowed a few minutes later to shake..





There were people of all stripes, colors, and persuasions there. It was a fabulous event with an amazing collage of people, and I even got to bump into a few old friends I had not seen in a long time and catch up with them a bit..