The Western Wall: Is it the Kotel or Al-Buraq Wall?

By Prof.Meir Loewenberg
Israel Resource Review
17 December '10

"The Shechina [Divine Presence] will never move from the Western Wall" according to an ancient tradition (Exodus Rabba 2.2). Originally, this saying did not refer to the present Western Wall which is part of retaining wall of the Temple Mount but to the western wall of the Temple-building. Since nothing remains of the original Temple wall, this saying is nowadays often applied to the Kotel, the current Western Wall. The ruins of the original western wall of the Temple building on the Temple Mount were still present during the Crusades when the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela visited Jerusalem sometime between 1159 and 1172. He reported that "the Western Wall is one of the [remaining] walls of what was once the Holy of Holies.... All the Jews come to pray before this wall."

The British Royal Commission that was established in 1930 to determine the respective claims of Moslems and Jews at Western Wall also confirmed that Jews continued to pray on the Temple Mount Western Wall after the destruction of the Second Temple. "According to tradition, the Jews' wailing-place at that time seems to have been the stone on Mount Moriah where the Mosque of Omar now stands."

There is no evidence that the present Western Wall was used as a site for prayer prior to the Ottoman conquest of Jerusalem in the 16th century. Rabbi Ishtori Haparchi (1280-1366), the earliest Holy Land geographer, does not mention the Western Wall in his encyclopedic work Kaftor v'Ferah, even though he devotes an entire chapter to Jerusalem geography. A footnote by the editor of the 1899 edition of Haparchi's book states that "in the author's day and for many years thereafter the Western Wall (where we pray nowadays) was covered with earth and all the Jews went to pray at the Eastern Wall of the Temple Mount and outside the gates of the Southern Wall."

Al-Mutawakil Taha, deputy minister of information in the Palestinian Authority disputed recently on a Palestinian government website that the Western Wall was a retaining wall of the Temple compound. "This wall has never been a part of what is called the Jewish Temple" the report claimed. "However, it was Islamic tolerance which allowed the Jews to stand before it and cry over its loss." A U.S. State Department spokesman said, "We strongly condemn these comments and fully reject them as factually incorrect, insensitive and highly provocative."

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