The day John Lennon sang in Hebrew

In March 1969, in a hotel room in Amsterdam, John Lennon sang in Hebrew — the first and only time he would ever do so. He and Yoko Ono were staging their anti–Vietnam War Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton, turning their honeymoon into a week-long protest. Journalists queued to speak to the couple beneath the sheets. Among them was an unknown Israeli graduate student, Akiva Nof, then studying in Amsterdam and freelancing for Kol Yisrael — the Voice of Israel.

“I waited until the last reporter left, then knocked,” recalls Nof, who now lives in Tel Aviv. “A man opened the door slightly and said, ‘Yesss…?’ I shouted, ‘I’m from the Voice of Israel!’”

It was loud enough. From inside the room Lennon called out: “Let the Voice of Israel come in.”

The Bed-In would soon produce Give Peace a Chance, recorded later that year in Montreal and destined to become one of the era’s defining protest anthems. But before that, in Amsterdam, there was this smaller, almost forgotten exchange.

Nof had brought with him a song he had written for the Choir of the IDF Chief Rabbinate, An Oath to Jerusalem. He wanted Lennon to sing it, but knew he could not read Hebrew, so he carefully transliterated the lyrics into English.

“John agreed, but minutes before he sang into my tape recorder, he sang part of a song that wasn’t yet released and added ‘Hello Israel.’” The song was I Want You (She’s So Heavy), which later appeared on Abbey Road.

“I was afraid someone — maybe a manager — would come in, realise he’d sung the new song, take my tape and throw me out,” says Nof. “So I only gave him two lines.”

Yerushalayim nishbanu kulam
Lo nafkirech od mi’kan ad olam

(Jerusalem, we all swore an oath / We won’t abandon you, forevermore )

Yoko joined in, and her husband opened with: “This is the voice of Lennon for the Voice of Israel.” The recording survived.

Lennon himself never reached Israel. In 1964, The Beatles were invited to perform there, but the government cancelled the concert over fears of the band’s “negative influence on youth” — a decision later widely regarded as one of the country’s great cultural miscalculations.

Nof, who lives in Tel Aviv, went on to become a lawyer, songwriter and member of the Knesset — and that extraordinary moment might have been lost to history were it not for his first cousin’s granddaughter, Rabbi Yael Buechler, who shared it with Life magazine. Lennon never stood on an Israeli stage. But in a hotel room in Amsterdam, Jerusalem reached him.