It was June 5 1967 and tiny Israel surrounded by 22 Arab nations threatening genocide was again at war — but this time the stakes were higher than ever. Even Jordan — the neighboring enemy that had maintained a somewhat cold peace with Israel after taking over Judea Samaria and half of Jerusalem in 1948 — joined the fray and swore to push the Jews into the sea. 

For 19 years with barbed wire and Jordanian legionnaires blocking the entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City there was a black hole in the heart of every Jew. The Kosel was in captivity. And now it looked like it would all be over. 

In Meah Shearim just meters away from Jordanian positions pious Jews spent the previous Shabbos digging trenches and sandbagging openings against sniper fire. The Chief Rabbinate had appropriated the Ramat Gan national park for a mass graveyard in anticipation of tens of thousands of casualties. The nations of the world had turned away. Was it possible to have two holocausts in a single generation?

But then something happened as if G-d decided to make a public confirmation that He alone was running the show. The Egyptian air force was decimated before it even got off the ground. Egyptian troops fled the Sinai leaving their rifles and even their shoes behind. On every front fighting was fierce and casualties were high yet victories were nothing short of miraculous. 

On the second night of the war photographer David Rubinger was tagging the Israeli forces in the Sinai when he overheard radio messages that something big was going to happen in the Holy City. So at around 2 a.m. he squeezed himself into a helicopter that was evacuating the wounded and landed in Beer Sheva where his car was parked and raced off to Jerusalem arriving early the next morning. 

“The Old City had just been recaptured and soldiers were streaming in the direction of the Kosel so I just followed the crowd” he remembers. 

Meanwhile three soldiers from the 55th Paratroop Brigade — Tzion Karasenti Yitzhak Yifat and Chaim Oshri — had just fought their way into the Old City after surviving the battle at Ammunition Hill on the outskirts of what is today Ramat Eshkol. The fighting in those trenches (which tourists can walk through today for a minimal fee) was deadly: underground hand-to-hand combat with the Jordanian enemy. There were many casualties among their comrades and those who survived felt like they were walking miracles. 

“My friend was shot in the lower back and he was about to be shot again when I shot his assailant” Dr. Yifat today a 70-year-old gynecologist from Kiryat Malachi said in an IDF journal. “Another Jordanian saw I was out of bullets and he charged at me with a bayonet. I don’t know how I did it but I took his gun and shot him. It was brutal.”

When Yifat and his friends reached the Kosel just minutes before the intrepid photographer something about the combination of humility and exhaustion on their faces caught Rubinger’s attention. “The entire space between the Kosel and the hovels that encroached upon it was only about ten-feet wide. There was no room to take a forward shot so I lay down on the ground because it was the only way to get the stones of the Wall into the frame. That’s why it seems like the soldiers are looking up. Actually they’re looking straight ahead but I was shooting from below.

Not ten minutes later Rubinger forgot all about that shot when a jeep with IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren bearing a shofar wended its way to the Wall. As he sounded a shofar blast that seemed at the time to reverberate through generations Rubinger clicked away. This would be the picture of the century.

“Everyone was crying even me — a cynical leftist” Rubinger admits.