Bring Back the Bell

In the middle of a park, in the middle of Jerusalem, sits a replica of the Liberty Bell. Because the area is named for it—Gan Ha-Pa’amon, Liberty Bell Park—it is often assumed that the bell was created specifically for that space. The true tale of Jerusalem’s Liberty Bell is far more interesting.

In 1956, Richardson Dilworth, the mayor of Philadelphia, visited Israel. As a gift from his city, he brought an exact replica of the bell that had been cast in 1751 to mark the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s charter of liberties. Photographs uncovered in 2023 by Knesset archivist Inda Novominsky reveal that the new bell was originally placed on the grounds of the original building in which Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, convened. And it was emblazoned with words from Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty unto all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.” The gift was a way of quite literally linking America and the biblical heritage of Jerusalem.

When the new (and present) Knesset edifice was about to be inaugurated in 1966, the bell was moved elsewhere on the Knesset campus. A decade later, Teddy Kollek, the legendary mayor of Jerusalem, had an inspiration. He had planned to place a bell in a new park that was to be opened in honor of America’s Bicentennial in 1976 as “an expression of the esteem in which we hold the American people and for their great assistance in the renaissance of the Jewish people in its land.” But why do so when there was exactly the thing nearby? “I would like the Knesset to make available to us the bell that is in the Knesset garden,” Kollek wrote to the speaker of the House, who agreed to relocate it from the Parliament area to the new park.