3 Best Sights in Jewish Quarter, Jerusalem

The 2,000-year-old Western Wall is in a class of its own. Its status as the most important existing Jewish shrine derives from its connection with the ancient Temple, the House of God. It was not itself part of the Temple edifice, but of the massive retaining wall King Herod built to create the vast platform now known as the Temple Mount.

After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70, and especially after the dedication of a pagan town in its place 65 years later, the city was off-limits to Jews for generations. The memory of the precise location of the Temple—in the vicinity of today's Dome of the Rock—was lost. Even when access was eventually regained, Jews avoided entering the Temple Mount for fear of unwittingly trespassing on the most sacred, and thus forbidden, areas of the long-gone ancient sanctuary. With time, the closest remnant of the period took on the aura of the Temple itself, making the Western Wall a kind of holy place by proxy.

Jewish visitors often just refer to the site as "the Wall" (Kotel in Hebrew); the "Wailing Wall" is a Gentile appellation, describing the sight—more common once—of devout Jews grieving for God's House. It is a telling point that, for many Jews, the ancient Temple was as much a national site as a religious one, and its destruction as much a national trauma as a religious cataclysm.

The Western Wall is in the southeast corner of the Old City, accessible from the Dung Gate, the Jewish Quarter, and the Muslim Quarter's El-Wad Road and the Street of the Chain. It functions under the aegis of the Orthodox rabbinic authorities, with all the trappings of an Orthodox synagogue.

Modest dress is required: for women, this means no shorts or bare shoulders. Men must cover their heads in the prayer area.

There is segregation of men and women in prayer, and smoking and photography on the Sabbath and religious holidays are prohibited. The cracks between the massive stones are stuffed with slips of paper bearing prayers and petitions. (These are collected several times a year and buried in a Jewish cemetery.) The swaying and praying of the devout reveal the powerful hold this place still has on the hearts and minds of many Jews.

The Wall is often crowded, but many people find that it's only when the crowds have gone (the Wall is floodlit at night and always open), and you share the warm, prayer-drenched stones with just a handful of bearded stalwarts or kerchiefed women, that the true spirituality of the Western Wall is palpable. (Expect a routine security check at all four entrances to the modern plaza, including a magnetic gate—visitors with pacemakers can avoid this—and examination of bags.)

For more information about this sight, see the "Jerusalem: Keeping the Faith" feature in this chapter.

The discovery in the 1970s of the massive 23-foot-thick foundations of an Old Testament city wall was hailed as one of the most important archaeological finds in the Jewish Quarter. Hezekiah, King of Judah and a contemporary of the prophet Isaiah, built the wall in 701 BC to protect the city against an impending Assyrian invasion. The unearthing of the Broad Wall—a biblical name—resolved a long-running scholarly debate about the size of Old Testament Jerusalem: a large on-site map shows that the ancient city was far more extensive than was once thought.

Today it's known for shopping, but the Cardo has a long history. In AD 135, the Roman emperor Hadrian built his town of Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of Jerusalem, an urban plan essentially preserved in the Old City of today. The cardo maximus, the generic name for the city's main north–south street, began at the present-day Damascus Gate, where sections of the Roman pavement have been unearthed. With the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, access to Mount Zion and its important Christian sites became a priority, and the main street was eventually extended south into today's Jewish Quarter. The original width—today you see only half—was 73 feet, about the width of a six-lane highway. A smattering of eclectic stores (jewelry, art, and Judaica) occupies the Cardo's medieval reincarnation.