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The Western Wall in Jerusalem Is Holy Only to Jews

(Israel Hayom) Nadav Shragai - The Western Wall of the Temple Mount became the central place for Jewish prayer in Jerusalem following the earthquake that shook the city in 1546. The earthquake brought down the buildings that had stood flush up against the Western Wall, in what today is the well-known prayer plaza, and allowed the Turks to allot the Jews a narrow passageway for their prayers. From the moment the Muslims allowed the Jews back into Jerusalem, over 1,000 years ago (after the Christians had barred them from the city), they would pray along the length of the Western Wall. The Western Wall became the preferred choice for prayer because it was closer to where the Jewish Temple was believed to have stood than any of the other walls of the Temple Mount. The identification of the Western Wall as the place where the Prophet Muhammad tied up his winged horse in his dream of a night journey from Mecca gained traction in the 1920s in response to the strengthening Jewish presence in the Holy Land. At the same time, Muslims went to great lengths to desecrate the place by intentionally throwing out animal waste there. Today, the Muslims are claiming that the Western Wall is holy to them, but they erected homes and outhouses in front of it and ran sewer pipes along it. A section of the Wall which lies in the heart of the Muslim Quarter is frequently defaced with graffiti and public urination and used as a trash heap. This is not how a religion treats a place it claims is holy. The writer is a journalist and commentator who has documented the dispute over Jerusalem for 30 years.
2018-06-19 00:00:00
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