To mark 40 years since his murder, Israeli TV airs clip of John Lennon singing in Hebrew

To mark 40 years since John Lennon’s murder, Israel’s Channel 12 news airs audio of the Beatles star singing in Hebrew during a 1969 interview with Akiva Nof, an Israeli journalist, ex-Knesset member, poet and author.

Lennon, who was in Amsterdam at the time holding a “bed-in for peace” with wife Yoko Ono, sings two lines from a song written by Nof, “Oath to Jerusalem,” in the brief audio clip.

Photos, flowers and candles are left at Strawberry Fields in New York’s Central Park to remember John Lennon, December 8, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

“Jerusalem, we have all sworn for eternity, we will not abandon you from here and forever,” Lennon is heard singing.

Nof, recalling the interview, says he was working as an Israel Radio (Voice of Israel) correspondent when he knocked on the door of Lennon’s hotel room and asked for an interview. He said he didn’t think he’d have the courage to do that kind of thing nowadays, but hadn’t at the time quite internalized “the greatness of the moment.”

A member of Lennon’s entourage was shaking his head at the interview request and closing the door in his face when Lennon called out from inside, “Let the Voice of Israel come in,” said Nof.

He and Lennon were then alone in the room — “for 10 minutes, and then another 10 minutes, and we had more than an interview; it was a discussion for half an hour,” he said. “My impression was that Lennon simply wanted to talk.”

Beatle John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, hold a bed-in for peace in room 902, the presidential suite at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam on March 25, 1969. (AP Photo)

At one point, said Nof, “I asked him if he knew any Israeli song, and he replied, ‘Only Hava Nagila, ha-ha-ha.’

“So I asked him if he would let me teach him two lines of a song of mine that at the time was being sung by the Israeli army’s rabbinical choir. He said, ‘Yes, yes, yes.'”

Nof — who had headed the youth leadership of the Herut party, a forerunner of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, and who later served three terms as an MK — continued: “I wrote out the words for him in Latin letters, taught him the tune in a flash, and he sang. And what did he sing? ‘Jerusalem, we have all sworn for eternity, we will not abandon you from here and forever.'”

Nof said Lennon also told him he was “looking forward to being an old person.” When he was murdered, said Nof, “I thought to myself that ‘you will never be old, but you will be young in our hearts forever’.”