Next week, just in time for the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War, the Congress is being asked — in a bipartisan demarche in the House — to make a statement in respect of Jerusalem. Israel’s capital was liberated during the war. All over this city — even this country — there are those who will carry to their graves the thrill of those hours and of the weeks that followed, when so many New Yorkers and others made their first visits to the City of David and on tiny slips of paper scrawled their prayers and pressed them into the cracks of the Western Wall. Over the next few days those who were there will be sharing the stories with their children, partly for the pleasure of it and partly in the hope that their children will remember and tell their own children.

The resolution that is due to be introduced in the Congress was reported on page one of yesterday’s New York Sun by our Eli Lake in Washington. We didn’t see it in the other papers, but that doesn’t diminish its importance. It was passed out of the Foreign Affairs committee without opposition and is likely to be passed in the House and the Senate by overwhelming margins. The resolution not only marks the 40th anniversary of the war and the liberation of Jerusalem but also calls on the administration to adhere to the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. The act declared as a matter of American law that American policy is that an undivided Jerusalem should be Israel’s capital and that our embassy should be there. It gave the president, President Clinton at the time, until May 1999 to move the embassy.

Congress provided the president some room to maneuver. It did not release him from the legal obligation to move the embassy, but did allow him to dodge the penalty – a curb on funding of the State Department — for failure to comply. The president could continue to get such funding if he invoked a waiver, which Mr. Clinton promptly did. When Mr. Bush ran for the White House in 2000, he promised to begin moving the embassy on the first day of his administration, but in December of 2001, not a full year into his presidency, Mr. Bush also invoked the waiver. He has been such a staunch friend of Israel and, by anyone’s lights, is entitled to extraordinary room to maneuver in a time of war. So neither Israel nor others have sought to pressure him.

All the more newsworthy that the 110th Congress is preparing, through the use of a resolution, to mark the point that it wants the Jerusalem Embassy Act to be adhered to and to do so on an anniversary when so many things come together. Here in New York, Natan Sharansky was due last night to speak at a gala dinner for the renovation of Israel’s Diaspora Museum, one of the institutions that connects Jews worldwide to Israel. The dinner marks another 40th anniversary, that of the struggle for freedom of Soviet Jewry, of which Mr. Sharansky is the most famous tribune. That struggle was ignited in part by the liberation of Jerusalem and the inspiration it provided to so many.

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Mr. Sharansky will then fly to another liberated capital, Prague, for a conference he and President Havel have organized on democracy and security. Their conference will draw others, including Prime Minister Aznar, the former leader of Spain, and President George Bush, whom Mr. Sharansky, over pastrami sandwiches at the Sun, described as another “dissident.” By this, Mr. Sharansky explained, he means someone who is not guided by the polls — and, indeed, may be out of favor of the polls — but instead is guided by principles. In his visit with us yesterday, Mr. Sharansky talked with great humor and admiration of Mr. Bush’s appreciation of the principles of freedom, of the universality of the desire of freedom and the idea that it is one of God’s gifts to man. No doubt as the conferees gather they will speak of the events of 40 years ago and of the inspiration they provide in a struggle that has only begun to secure that freedom in so many places across the globe.