Photo Credit: Yori Yanover / JewishPress.com
The slaughtered "Pascal" goat's blood was collected in a gold vessel to be sprinkled on a makeshift altar, in the middle of a JCC basketball court.
How would a secular journalist transmit the context for this event? Tough question…

(Although one of them, working for AFP, confessed to me that she had no idea how to sell these images to her editors. How would she create the context for them, within which they could understand why this was a thrilling, uplifting event, and not images of barbarian Jews ganging up on two innocent goats.)

The goats were sweet and wooly and tiny.

The goats were sweet and wooly and tiny. The organizers had promised a “kazayis” (the size of an olive) bit of roasted goat’s flesh to each member of the crowd, but those small creatures didn’t look like they had enough meat on them for even that little. Meanwhile they stayed near the wall of the Matnas, touched and petted and groped and pushed around a bit by a million children – which I’m sure that’s how it felt from the goat’s point of view.

The goats had to be moved to a nearby basketball court for the slaughter.
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The crowd was so absolutely eager and relentless, it became apparent that the slaughtering of the animals just couldn’t take place over there, in the midst of all the people. It just didn’t make sense for anyone, including a skilled shochet, to be wielding a sharp instrument inside that ever-pressing, shifting, squeezing, pushing and shoving mayhem.

The animal was presented for the slaughter.

So, once the two animals had been inspected by a Jerusalem Municipality veterinarian—who was an Arab, to make this an even happier story—the organizers decided to shoo away the basketball players from the fenced court nearby and the thick procession was transported over there, with many hundreds now pressing their faces against the cyclone fences.

In the end, one of the goats was shechted, quickly and expertly, and its blood was collected into a special, gold vessel, and sprinklde over the base of the quickly assembled altar.

The priest sprinkled the collected blood onto the base of the altar.

Then the animal was skinned – expertly, and the parts of its body which would have been sacrificed on the altar were paraded around the inside of all the fences, for everyone to glare at with the yearning curiosity and desire of someone who’s just come home after being away for years and years, and they’re standing outside their father’s place, there’s a light inside and joyous noises are emanating, and any minute now they would come up the stoop and push the doorbell…

It was the most exhausting assignment I’ve engaged in in some time, even though it only lasted a few hours. It was draining, emotionally and spiritually, to be struggling with my camera and tape recorder to get the shot against a sea of humanity, who so obviously wanted to become one with the goat and the knife and the sprinkled blood and the roasting fire. It was love of Heaven pushed through a meat grinder, passion for a better world jettisoned against the walls of a starved gathering.

The skinned animal was carried to the fire.

When the real Messiah comes, I must have a couple of urgent words with him regarding crowd control.

May we all merit to partake of the Pascal sacrifice in our lifetime!
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Yori Yanover has been a working journalist since age 17, before he enlisted and worked for Ba'Machane Nachal. Since then he has worked for Israel Shelanu, the US supplement of Yedioth, JCN18.com, USAJewish.com, Lubavitch News Service, Arutz 7 (as DJ on the high seas), and the Grand Street News. He has published Dancing and Crying, a colorful and intimate portrait of the last two years in the life of the late Lubavitch Rebbe, (in Hebrew), and two fun books in English: The Cabalist's Daughter: A Novel of Practical Messianic Redemption, and How Would God REALLY Vote.