Prague Journal

Monday, April 18, 2005.

Rick was eager to have some time to himself, but I was eager to see as much of the city sights as possible, so he spent the morning with Ronnie at the university and I walked through the lovely university gardens, across the bridge, through the World Rose Garden, to the Israel Museum. Like the Tel Aviv Museum, this museum has an extensive modern art collection. But the Israel Museum also has the most important archaeological finds made in Israel, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are housed in the Shrine of the Book. There are also exhibitions of ethnography, Jewish art objects, the cultures of neighboring lands, and local and international art. Founded in 1965, the Israel Museum is the leading cultural institution in Israel and is one of the largest encyclopedic museums in the world.
Its terraced complex, comprising nearly 50,000 square meters and a six-acre sculpture garden within its twenty-acre campus attracts over 950,000 visitors each year, about a third of them international tourists and including nearly 100,000 children in the educational programs at its Youth Wing. This museum has extensive holdings of the world’s pre-eminent collection of the archaeology of the Holy Land, the world’s most comprehensive collections of Judaica and the ethnology of the Jewish people around the world, and fine art holdings from Old Masters in European Art through international contemporary art. Obviously, one morning did not allow enough time to do justice to the museum, but after four hours I was ready to take a break.
Yaffa and Rick met me at the museum entrance and we drove to the Jaffa Gate of the Old City to see the new Davidson Center archeological museum and the Ophel archeological excavations near the Western Wall (“Kotel”). The Jaffa Gate is the main entrance to the city, built by Suleiman in 1538. As everyone knows, the western wall is the remains of the western retaining wall of the Temple Mount, including what is known of as Robinson’s Arch, on the southern end of the wall. Robinson’s Arch was originally thought to be a series of bridges leading from the Upper City to the Temple Mount, but this has recently been disproven. The original thinking of Robinson’s Arch was that when King Herod enlarged the area of the Temple Mount during the 1st century BCE, the wall was higher in the southern part and a valley was created. This valley separated the Western Wall from the Upper City, making difficult direct access to the Temple Mount. A series of bridges and arches over the valley to the Temple Mount was created to solve this problem. One of these arches, located close to the southern end of the Western Wall, is known as Robinson’s Arch, discovered in 1838 and named after its discoverer, American researcher Edward Robinson. Excavations in 1968-1977 revealed that the arch had spanned over paved streets at multiple angles. A row of small vaults was also discovered. This row of vaults, together with the arches, supported a flight of steps leading from the street to the Temple Mount.
In the past few years, the Israeli government has used Robinson’s arch as a place for groups to pray that do not meet the approval of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, as the arch area is not under the control of the Religious Affairs Ministry. Since 2000, egalitarian prayer has taken place at the site under the auspices of the Conservative Masorti movement. The Reform movement was also offered Robinson’s Arch as a prayer site but they refused. In May 2000 the woman’s prayer group “Women of the Wall” was offered Robinson’s Arch as an alternative to the Kotel for their Orthodox women’s prayer group, but they were allowed to continue their traditional prayer at the Western Wall when the court ruled that Robinson’s Arch would not be suitable for their prayer. However, in April 2003, the Supreme Court refused to allow Women of the Wall to continue their prayer group at the Wall and instead required the government to prepare an area at Robinson’s arch within 12 months. Women of the Wall members do not feel that the Robinson’s Arch-area is a suitable prayer area.
Rick and Yaffa and I went to the prayer areas at the Western Wall (separate sections for men and women, of course) with notes on slips of paper to place in the wall. There is a long tradition of placing small personal notes of request in the cracks between the stones and there is hardly a space in the wall without many wads of paper tightly stuffed in the cracks between the stones. It is now also possible to send notes to the wall via a fax service given by the Israeli telephone company!
According to Jewish legend this wall was the contribution of the poor people to the building of the Temple: When the Temple was being built, the work was divided among the different sections of the population. The building of the Western Wall was allotted to the poor. They worked very hard to construct it, as they could not afford hired laborers to work in their place. When the enemy destroyed the Temple, the angels descended from on high, and, spreading their wings over the Wall, said: “This wall, the work of the poor shall never be destroyed.” Most of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, which was about 485 meters long, is hidden by the buildings adjoining it. Until June 1967 the accessible portion of the wall was no longer than 28 meters. In front of it ran a stone-paved alley 3.5 meters wide bordered on its west side by a slum area. The wall aboveground consisted of 24 rows of stones of different dressing and age, reaching a total height of 18 m. with 6 m. above the level of the Temple Mount. In 1867 excavations revealed that 19 more rows lay buried underground, the lowest of which was sunk into the natural rock of the Tyropoeon Valley. In 1968 the ground in front of the wall was excavated to reveal two of the buried rows of stone, and the wall then consisted of seven layers of huge, marginally dressed (“Herodian”) stones from the Second Temple, above which are four layers of smaller, plainly dressed stones from the Roman or Byzantine periods. The upper stones were constructed after the Moslem conquest. Jewish travelers over the centuries used to marvel at the immense dimensions of the lower stones – average height 1 m and length 3 m, but some as long as 12 m. and weighing over 100 tons – and believed they were part of Solomon’s Temple. They were probably quarried at the Cave of Zedkiah, near the Damascus Gate. In order to withstand the soil pressure of the filling behind the wall, the rows were laid in a terraced manner, with each row set back a few centimeters relative to the one beneath it. The wall thus slants slightly eastward. This factor, the weight of the stones, and the accuracy of the cutting account for the unusual stability of the wall. The underground tunnel starting at the north-west of the prayer plaza passes close to the part of the Western Wall that is hidden by the buildings. It goes through a system of vaulted areas and water cisterns. About 350 m. of the wall have been uncovered, up to the northern edge, which is the north-western corner of the Temple Mount. The largest stones of the wall were found in a tunnel, including a giant stone about 60 m long, 3 m. high and 4 m. wide, weighing approximately 400 tons.
While it was late afternoon by the time we got to the wall, I have never seen this area so sparsely populated. The path to the Temple Mount is blocked and there are surveillance cameras and security guards all around. This may be the safest place on earth.

posted by JWinn @ 11:02 PM