The Western Wall

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The Western Wall (sometimes called the Wailing Wall, or the Kotel, the Hebrew word for wall) is one of the last remaining walls of the Temple Mount, the elevated plaza in the Old City of Jerusalem that was the site of both ancient Jewish temples. It is the holiest site in Judaism and a place of pilgrimage and prayer.

The holiness of the Western Wall derives from its proximity to the location where the ancient temples once stood and which today houses the Al Aqsa Mosque and the iconic gold-topped Dome of the Rock, the third holiest site in Islam, from which Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven. After the Second Temple was destroyed in by the Romans in 70 CE, the Western Wall became the closest Jews could come to the place where the Temple once stood. Many have the custom of writing prayers on pieces of paper and placing them inside crevices of the wall. Opposite the wall is a large open plaza that leads into a gender-segregated place for prayer. 

After the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the War of Independence, the eastern portion of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, came under Jordanian rule and Jews were unable to pray there. But during the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel reunified the city and recaptured the wall. An Israeli commander, Mordechai Gur, famously announced its recapture on his radio, excitedly declaring “the Kotel is in our hands.” Rabbi Shlomo Goren, then the Israeli military’s chief rabbi, blew the shofar to mark the momentousness of the occasion. Since then, Israel greatly expanded the area for prayer at the wall and the surrounding plaza. The western wall is the last remaining wall of the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.