Police arrest 13 for trying to ‘sacrifice’ bread on Temple Mount to mark Shavuot

Suspects said to bring loaves of bread for the harvest holiday instead of an animal sacrifice, as activists did earlier this month and in April

Police said they arrested 13 people on Friday for breaking into the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City and attempting to carry out a sacrifice to mark the Jewish festival of Shavuot.

The suspects broke through security to the holy site and ran into the compound while trying to perform the ritual, police said.

There were no reports of any animal being brought to the Temple Mount, with the suspects instead carrying loaves of bread, according to the Ynet news site.

Bread made from freshly harvested wheat is customarily part of the sacrifice for the Shavuot holiday, an agricultural festival.

While the two temples have not existed and Jews have not performed such sacrifices for nearly 2,000 years, small groups ascend the mount perennially to try to revive the ritual, without success.

The Temple Mount, revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, is Judaism’s holiest site and the third holiest site in Islam, and has long been a flashpoint for conflict.

Public Jewish prayer — and animal sacrifice — is prohibited there. National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a frequent visitor to the site, has pushed to change the ban on prayer, prompting fury in the Muslim world and denials from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the status quo has changed.

Earlier this month, police arrested 21 people suspected of trying to bring a sacrificial goat up to the Temple Mount, a month after arresting 14 Jewish men and boys for trying to smuggle sacrificial goats onto the holy site.

Small groups have been trying to bring back sacrifice at the mount for years, connected to a fringe movement that seeks to build a Third Temple at the site where the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock now stand.

Ritual sacrifice and actively working to reconstruct the temple have not been part of mainstream Jewish practice for many centuries, and Jewish legal authorities are divided on whether it is permissible for Jews to even set foot on the mount.

“Bringing a sacrifice to the Temple Mount is contrary to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel’s ruling,” Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, the chief rabbi of the Western Wall, said in a statement in 2022.