A Shrine Turned Into a Fringe Pilgrimage

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Israel outlawed the Kach movement and its offshoot Kahane Chai as terrorist organizations in the massacre's aftermath, and the Shamgar Commission's findings led to changes in Israeli security procedures at the shrine. Goldstein's own Kach ideology held that Jewish sovereignty over the whole biblical land of Israel was a religious imperative, a position the great majority of religious Jewish authorities and organizations at the time and since have explicitly repudiated as a distortion rather than an expression of Judaism.

A small fringe within the settler movement has nonetheless since venerated Goldstein's grave as a shrine, a veneration Israeli authorities and the great majority of Israeli public opinion have condemned; the site was later altered to discourage pilgrimage to it. The Israeli government's own Shamgar Commission investigated the massacre as a security failure and the state outlawed Kach and Kahane Chai in direct response, an unambiguous official condemnation, so the dispute this atlas records is narrower than the massacre itself: that a small fringe continues to honor an act the state and mainstream religious authority alike have formally disowned.