48 Fun Facts About Western Wall

The Western Wall's plaza lies in the Jewish Quarter; most of the wall hides behind houses in which quarter?

The Muslim Quarter's medieval houses were built right along the wall, so only a short stretch of its 488 metres faces the open prayer plaza.

Which ruler is thought to have begun the wall while expanding the Temple Mount around 19 BCE?

Herod the Great doubled the size of the Temple Mount, and the wall was built to hold up the enlarged platform, never as part of the Temple itself.

Israeli troops reached the Western Wall on 7 June 1967, midway through which war?

The Six-Day War began on 5 June and the Old City fell two days later; pictures of soldiers weeping at the wall became some of the conflict's defining images.

Which gold-capped shrine on the Temple Mount rises directly above the Western Wall?

The Dome of the Rock has crowned the Mount since the 690s, and because the wall is part of that compound's boundary, control of the prayer site below has long been disputed.

The wall's huge blocks are of what kind of stone?

Meleke limestone, Jerusalem's 'royal' stone, can be soft enough to cut with a knife when first exposed, then hardens in the air into a durable building block.

The wall is revered for its closeness to the presumed site of which part of the Temple?

The Holy of Holies stood at the Temple's western end, which is why this wall, of the four around the Mount, is held the holiest.

Who became the first sitting US president to visit the Western Wall?

Donald Trump made the visit in May 2017, resting a hand on the stones and slipping a folded note into a crack, as visiting dignitaries have long done.

The name 'Wailing Wall' has historically been used mainly by whom?

Christians, mostly European travellers who watched Jews mourn the lost Temple there, coined the name; Hebrew never adopted it, and its speakers simply say the Kotel, 'the wall'.

In the Islamic world the wall is named after Buraq, who or what was Buraq?

Muhammad's winged steed, Buraq, carried him from Mecca to Jerusalem in a single night and is said to have been tethered at the wall while he ascended to heaven.

After crushing which Jewish revolt in 135 CE did Rome ban Jews from Jerusalem?

The Bar Kokhba revolt ended in 135 CE with Jews shut out of the city, and later emperors let them return to the Temple ruins on only one day a year, to mourn.

Which Roman general's triumphal arch shows soldiers carrying off the Temple's menorah after the sack of 70 CE?

Titus destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, and the menorah carved on his arch in Rome was later copied for the emblem of the State of Israel.

Whose army destroyed the First Temple, on the hill behind the Western Wall, in 586 BCE?

The Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar razed the First Temple and deported Judah's people; a second Temple rose on the same spot about seventy years later.

Which Ottoman sultan is said to have cleared the wall for Jewish prayer?

Suleiman the Magnificent, who rebuilt the city walls that still stand, is credited with clearing the wall's foot and recognising the Jews' right to pray there.

Which family celebration fills the plaza on Monday and Thursday mornings, the weekdays when the Torah is read?

A bar mitzvah: a boy turning thirteen is called up to read from the Torah for the first time, so families choose the weekdays when the scroll is brought out.

David Rubinger's famous 1967 photograph shows three Israeli soldiers of which kind gazing up at the wall?

Paratroopers: Rubinger thought little of the shot and preferred another he took minutes later, until his wife told him the one of the three soldiers was better.

Which Jewish philanthropist tried in 1887 to buy the houses facing the wall and clear them for a plaza?

Baron Rothschild meant to rehouse the residents and open a wide square for worshippers; the Ottoman authorities seemed ready to agree, yet the purchase was never completed.

Which British general captured Jerusalem in December 1917?

Edmund Allenby got off his horse and walked in through the Jaffa Gate, a deliberate show of respect for a city holy to three faiths.

On Yom Kippur 1928, British police forcibly removed what from the prayer area?

A screen separating men and women was torn down mid-service because officials saw it as a breach of the rule against building at the wall, and the outcry fed the tension that exploded in the riots of 1929.

Which song did hundreds of young Zionists sing at the wall while raising their flag in August 1929?

Hatikvah was sung as some 300 marchers raised the Zionist flag; a far larger counter-demonstration followed the next day, and a week later riots spread across Palestine.

The August 1929 riots that began at the wall spread within days to a massacre of Jews in which city?

Hebron saw 67 Jews killed, and within a few years none of its centuries-old Jewish community remained in the city.

The 1930 international commission ruled the wall belonged to whom?

The Muslim waqf was confirmed as sole owner of the wall and the pavement in front of it, even as the commission upheld the Jews' right to come there to pray at all times.

Which country controlled the Old City from 1948 to 1967, when Jews were barred from the wall?

Jordan had signed an armistice in 1949 that promised access to the holy places, yet in nineteen years of its rule no Israeli Jew was allowed to reach the wall.

By which biblical name is the Temple Mount, the hill behind the wall, also known?

Mount Moriah is where tradition places Abraham's binding of Isaac, and that story is why the hill is said to have been chosen as the site for the Temple.

Which chief army rabbi led the first Jewish prayers at the wall since 1948 on the day it was captured?

Shlomo Goren arrived minutes after the first soldiers, who lifted him onto their shoulders in front of the stones; he later became Israel's Ashkenazi chief rabbi.

The wall's plaza was created in June 1967 by bulldozing which centuries-old neighbourhood?

The Moroccan Quarter, founded for North African pilgrims in the 1190s, stood barely four metres from the wall; its residents were ordered out at night, days after the Old City was taken.

Wilson's Arch, now a covered prayer hall beside the wall, once supported what?

A bridge crossed the valley on this arch from the Upper City on the opposite hill, giving a level road onto the Mount; the arch is named after the British surveyor who recorded it in the 1860s.

What are the written prayers tucked into the wall's cracks called in Yiddish?

Kvitlach, 'little notes', began as written petitions handed to Hasidic rebbes; at the wall the custom has grown to more than a million a year, some sent in by fax and email.

Which Jewish fast day marking the Temples' destruction draws especially large crowds to the wall?

Tisha B'Av brings tens of thousands to the wall, where they gather after dark to chant the Book of Lamentations and dirges for the lost Temples.

Which biblical king built the First Temple on the hill behind the Western Wall?

King Solomon completed it in the tenth century BCE; his father David had brought the Ark to Jerusalem and picked the site, but the building was left to the son.

Which British officer, later London's police chief during the Jack the Ripper murders, sank shafts along the wall in 1867?

Charles Warren's shafts can still be seen under Wilson's Arch, and a sealed ancient entrance to the Temple Mount that he found is now called Warren's Gate.

Which prime minister authorised a new exit from the Western Wall Tunnel to the Via Dolorosa in 1996?

Benjamin Netanyahu approved the exit after two predecessors had refused to, and the opening set off days of fighting between Israeli troops and Palestinian police that left dozens dead.

Where does the wall's biggest block, the so-called Western Stone, lie exposed to view?

Inside the tunnel north of the plaza lies the 13.5-metre Western Stone; a 2006 radar scan found it far thinner than assumed, cutting its estimated weight from nearly 600 tonnes to about half.

Robinson's Arch, at the southern end of the wall, once supported what?

A monumental staircase climbed over the arch from the street to the Temple Mount; it was wrecked in the war with Rome a few decades after it was built, and the stones thrown down still lie on the street below.

Which movements hold mixed services at the Robinson's Arch prayer area, opened in 2004 away from the main plaza?

Reform and Conservative Jews were given the site after Israel's Supreme Court in 2003 upheld Orthodox rules at the wall itself but told the government to prepare the arch area for other forms of worship.

Women of the Wall long fought a ban on women doing what there?

Reading Torah aloud, like wearing a prayer shawl, was barred to women at the main plaza for years after the group was founded in 1988; in 2013 a Jerusalem court ruled that their services broke no law.

Men of every faith are expected to put on which item before approaching the wall?

A skullcap, or kippah, is worn as a mark of respect, and visiting American presidents have put one on to pray at the stones.

What happens to the prayer notes cleared from the wall twice a year?

Buried on the Mount of Olives: the notes are prised out with wooden sticks, never metal, then treated like worn-out holy books and laid to rest in the cemetery there.

Whose prayer note, written on hotel stationery, was pulled from the wall in 2008 and printed by a newspaper?

Barack Obama, then a candidate, had asked for wisdom and help against pride and despair; a seminary student fished the note out and Maariv published it, to the fury of the wall's rabbi.

Which pope was the first to pray at the Western Wall, leaving a signed note that asked God's forgiveness?

John Paul II's typed, signed prayer of March 2000 asked forgiveness for the suffering inflicted on Jews; it was lifted from the stones and is kept at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial.

Volunteers from which Hasidic movement run the stand by the wall where passers-by are helped to put on tefillin?

Chabad set up the stand soon after the wall changed hands in 1967; its rebbe had launched a tefillin campaign two days before the war began, and hundreds of thousands took part within months.

Which Israeli philosopher called the attitude towards the wall 'idolatry'?

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, himself an Orthodox Jew, mocked the site as the 'Discotel' and argued that treating any place as closer to God than another was a form of idol worship.

From 1948 to 1967, Israelis cut off from the wall climbed to a rooftop on which hill to pray toward it?

Mount Zion, just outside the Old City walls, was the nearest point left in Israeli hands, so worshippers climbed to the roof above King David's reputed tomb for a view toward the Temple Mount.

Which ancient writer recorded that the Temple Mount's walls were finished only generations after the king who began them?

Josephus, a rebel commander who went over to Rome, dated the last work to the reign of the builder's great-grandson, Agrippa II, before the whole compound was destroyed.

What, found under the wall's foundations in 2011, showed it was finished after its royal builder's death?

Roman coins struck about twenty years after the king died lay inside a ritual bath that had been filled in to carry the wall, so the builders cannot have finished in his lifetime.

In the 1930s, young Jews were arrested each year for doing what at the wall as Yom Kippur ended?

Blowing the shofar there was banned under British rule, yet it was sounded every Yom Kippur until 1948 by men who expected arrest; the first, in 1930, was freed when the chief rabbi refused to break his fast.

Which Persian king let the exiled Jews return and rebuild the Temple on the hill behind the wall?

Cyrus the Great issued the order in 538 BCE, and the modest Temple the returning exiles built stood for five centuries before it was rebuilt on a far grander scale.

What marks out the wall's original Second Temple-era blocks from the later stones laid above them?

A chiselled border frames each of the giant original blocks, so the wall reads like a timeline: bordered ashlars below, smaller and plainer stones from later repairs above.

Besides prayers and Bar Mitzvahs, the 1967 plaza regularly hosts which military event?

Crowds are largest on Tisha B'Av and on Jerusalem Day, which marks the city's reunification in 1967.