(Israel Hayom) Nadav Shragai - The Palestinian media are again recycling the false claim that "the Jews have no ties with the Western Wall" in Jerusalem. PA leader Mahmoud Abbas has claimed that "the Muslims own the exclusive religious, historical and legal rights to the Western Wall, which is part of Al-Aqsa." The Palestinian Authority even claimed that there is no documented record that the Jews designated the Western Wall as a site for ritual worship at any time, only doing so after the Balfour Declaration in 1917. In this way, the Palestinians are essentially turning history upside down, falsifying it and rewriting it. The Western Wall became the Jews' principal place of prayer in 1546, following the earthquake that rocked Jerusalem in that year that caused the buildings adjacent to the Western Wall to collapse. It enabled the Turks to respond to the Jews' request and to allocate them an extremely narrow alleyway to be used for prayers. Moreover, historical testimony shows that after the Muslim conquest of the land allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem more than one thousand years ago (after the Christians had forced them out of the city), they prayed alongside the Western Wall, much of which was free of Muslim construction. Jews prayed at the southern corner of the Western Wall as well as along its northern parts: in the vicinity of the Cotton Merchants' Gate, the Iron Gate and the Council Gate. Until Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders in 1099, a synagogue known as the "Cave" operated in an underground space beneath Warren's Gate in the Western Wall. The "Cave" was located exactly opposite where the Holy of Holies was believed to have stood. The Cairo Geniza, which was discovered some 160 years ago in the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, also contained documentation of Jewish prayers at the Western Wall dating back to the ninth and ten centuries. A long list of Muslim sources and clerics have for 1,350 years identified the Temple Mount as the site of the Jewish Temple. Persian historian Abu Ja'far al-Tabari (838-923), one of the first, most prominent and renowned commentators on the Qu'ran and the Muslim tradition, wrote that the Temple Mount "was built by Solomon, the son of David." The Muslim claim that the Western Wall was actually one of the walls of Al-Aqsa only took root following 1967, after the Muslims expanded the definition of Al-Aqsa from the southern mosque alone and applied it to the entire compound and its surrounding walls.
2024-06-20 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive