The mayor of Jerusalem is considered one of the most prestigious positions in the Jewish world. Immediately after the prime minister and the president, and just before the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the mayor of Jerusalem is the closest to vie for the title of the "President of the Jewish People." There is no greater consensus in Judaism than about Jerusalem, which embodies all the prayers and the yearnings of the Jewish people for millennia.
The name of the city is not recited in prayers only. It is also featured in the slogans of all of Israel's general elections: "Peres will divide Jerusalem" brought Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power in the 1996 elections. It also appears at pivotal junctures in the life of every Jew, wherever he is.
The two times in which Jerusalem was destroyed (the destruction of the First and Second Temples) are considered to this day to be the biggest disasters that befell the Jewish people alongside the decimation of European Jewry during the Holocaust.
In negotiations with the Palestinians, Jerusalem is considered the most intractable issue and the hardest to solve. Israel sees a solid and constant majority against the division of Jerusalem or against making any concessions over the holy places, chief among them the Western Wall, the only remnant of the Jewish Temple, deemed the holiest place in Judaism. When a young Jewish man takes a wife, the sentence that reverberates during the huppah matrimonial ceremony is: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy." (Psalms, chapter 137, verses 5,6) What's the connection between Jerusalem and a wedding? Well, there isn't any. But it is what it is.
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