Purging prayers from the Wall
Baku, March 29 (AZERTAC). Each year, hundreds of thousands of prayer notes are stuffed into the Western Wall — Judaism’s holiest site — by visitors, tourists, and foreign dignitaries.
The Western Wall’s Rabbi, Shmuel Rabinowitz, and his helpers remove thousands of handwritten notes placed between the ancient stones of the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, in the Old City of Jerusalem.
The tradition of placing notes in the Kotel — as the Western Wall is known in Hebrew — dates back to the early 18th century.
The operation is carried out twice each year: before the Passover festival which begins next week and at the Jewish New Year in the fall.
Twice a year, before Passover and before Rosh Hashanah, the myriad scraps of paper are removed.
Western Wall employees are cleaning out thousands of prayer notes. The once-stuffed cracks in the millennia-old, limestone wall are exposed, awaiting fresh wishes, hopes, and prayers.
An estimated one million notes are placed in the wall each year. When they first arrive, letters addressed to “God, Jerusalem” are wedged into the wall by Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, the site’s caretaker, who also attends to cleaning the notes out when the time comes.
After removal, the thousands of notes are buried on the nearby Mount of Olives.
The Western Wall, Wailing Wall or Kotel is located in the Old City of Jerusalem at the foot of the western side of the Temple Mount. It is a remnant of the ancient wall that surrounded the Jewish Temple’s courtyard, and is one of the most sacred sites in Judaism outside of the Temple Mount itself.
It has been a site for Jewish prayer and pilgrimage for centuries, the earliest source mentioning Jewish attachment to the site dating from the 4th century. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War the wall came under Jordanian control and Jews were barred from the site for 19 years until Israel captured the Old City in 1967. Following Israel’s victory during the 1967 Six-Day War, the Western Wall came under Israeli control.
There is a much publicised practice of placing slips of paper containing written prayers into the crevices of the Wall. People will write notes with their wishes, then place them in the cracks hoping they will come true. The earliest account of this practice is recorded in Sefer Tamei Ha-minhagim U’mekorei Ha-dinim and involves Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar, (d. 1743). More than a million notes are placed each year and the opportunity to e-mail notes is offered by a number of organisations. It has become customary for visiting dignitaries to place notes too.
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