He used the opportunity to help establish and organize the military chaplaincy's framework, streamlining processes to get soldiers accommodations for kosher food and prayer services.

On 7 June 1967, when Israeli troops captured East Jerusalem from Jordanian control, Goren gave a prayer of thanksgiving, which was broadcast live to the entire country.

The event was one of the defining moments of the Arab–Israeli conflict, and several photographs of Goren surrounded by soldiers in prayer have since become famous among Jews in Israel and worldwide.

[10] Goren attracted many admirers through his passion for Religious Zionism and his combining of Zionist activism with a commitment to Judaism and Jewish scholarship.

Maj. Hanoch Langer, and his sister Miriam, who had been declared mamzerim, and therefore ineligible for marriage to an Israelite by a Beit Din in Petah Tikva.

[12] The Langer children had been designated as mamzerim because their mother had married their father, without having been divorced from her previous husband, thus committing adultery according to Jewish law.

[13] Goren spent most of his term as Chief Rabbi of Israel attempting to reconcile Jewish religious teachings with modern problems of the state, including advancements in technological progress and various high-profile conversion cases.

[15] One example of Goren's desire to adapt Halakha to changing realities in science was his controversial stance on Kiddush Levana, the monthly blessing over the new moon.

On 15 August 1967, two months after the Six-Day War, Goren led a group of fifty Jews onto the Temple Mount, where, fighting off protesting Muslim guards and Israeli police, they defiantly held a prayer service.

His call for the establishment of a synagogue on the Temple Mount has subsequently been reiterated by his brother-in-law,[19] the former Chief Rabbi of Haifa, She'ar Yashuv Cohen.

The episode led the Chief Rabbis of the time to restate the accepted laws of Judaism that no Jews were allowed on the mount due to issues of ritual impurity.

Disagreeing with his colleagues, Goren continually maintained that Jews were not only permitted, but commanded, to ascend and pray on the mount which is the holiest site in Judaism.

[24] However, Goren did make a speech later that year to a military convention, recorded and later broadcast on Israel's army radio,[25] in which he said of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque that "Certainly we should have blown it up.

He was deeply opposed to the Oslo Accords and in 1993 declared that it was halakhically forbidden to dismantle any settlements in the Biblical Land of Israel, and encouraged any soldiers ordered to do so to refuse.

In 1982 he and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef officially condemned a shooting attack on the Temple Mount by an American immigrant which resulted in the death of two Muslims and the wounding of several others.

In a joint statement released by the Chief Rabbis, they declared that "We and the entire Jewish people attack and deplore the criminal act of murder in every possible way.