The synagogue is deep inside the complex and is adjacent to the area above which the ancient Jewish temples on the Temple Mount stood, and the inner sanctum of the Holy of Holies in particular. This beautiful place took 12 years to build and was funded by donations from the Delek Foundation and Delek Group owner Yitzhak Tshuva. This is deep inside the complex, adjacent to the area above which the ancient temples stood on the Temple Mount, and the inner sanctum of the Holy of Holies in particular. The ark’s walls are formed from the words of the “Shema Yisrael” prayer and the Biblical Book of the Song of Songs cast in metal and running the entire circumference of the sphere, topped by a cast metal sculpture of the burning bush. (Source)
If consensus is reached on the location of an ancient synagogue built beneath the Temple Mount, it could prove that Jews have been praying at the Western Wall for 1,000 years.
Time and forgotten history have limited what is known about the secret of the “Cave,” an ancient synagogue beneath the Temple Mount that was used by the Jews of Jerusalem. Still, scraps of information, crumbling historical documents, and existing research are gradually shedding light on one of the more intriguing mysteries in Jerusalem.
The only part of the synagogue’s story about which there is consensus took place in the first half of the Hebrew month of Av in the year 1099, when Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders. Jews and Muslims fought shoulder-to-shoulder for the city, but were eventually defeated, and the Crusaders slaughtered the residents of Jerusalem. Until the Holocaust, rabbis noted the killings as one of the worst disasters to befall the Jewish people since the destruction of the Second Temple. Lamentations written to commemorate the violence were added to the Lamentations read on Tisha B’Av.
“All the defenders fled along the walls of the city, and the Crusaders pursued them and killed them, cutting them down the entire way to Solomon’s Temple,” wrote one anonymous Crusader.
“There, a slaughter took place until our people were wading ankle-deep through the blood of the enemies,” he continued.
According to Gilo of Paris, a 12th-century poet, the Jews took the lead in defending Jerusalem and were the last to fall. Muslim historian Ibn al-Qalanisi says that the Jews of the city fled to the Cave Synagogue, where the Crusaders burned them alive, a story corroborated by the 12th-century Arab writer Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi: “The slaughter in the city was terrible. They gathered the Jews in their synagogue, and then set it on fire.”
Historian Joshua Prawer says that nothing comparable had been perpetrated against the Jews since the Emperor Titus besieged the city.
“When all hope was lost, the Jews shut themselves in the synagogue and waited for help from Heaven … the Crusaders burned the synagogues, with the Jews who fled inside, and they called out to God,” he wrote.
The most famous of these synagogues was the “Cave.”
Archaeologist Dan Bahat, who excavated and researched the Western Wall tunnels, thinks that he has discovered the location of the Cave Synagogue.
He believes that it lies “in the area of Warren’s Gate,” underground, which is why it is known as the “Cave.” Warren’s Gate is named after the English researcher Sir Charles Warren (1840-1927) and is one of four gates that in the Second Temple Era led from the Western Wall to the Temple Mount. In the past, it opened to a tunnel that was dug eastward under the Mount and ended in stairs leading up to the Temple Mount plaza.
Bahat thinks that in the Early Muslim Period (638-1099), the Jews of Jerusalem established their main synagogue near the gate because of its proximity to where they believed the Holiest of Holies was located beneath the Dome of the Rock.
“For hundreds of years, it was the center of Jewish life in Jerusalem, but the Crusaders, who conquered Jerusalem in 1099, wiped out the city’s Jewish community, blocked off the gate, and turned the synagogue into a cistern. That cistern is known in scientific literature as Cistern 30, one of a list of 38 on the Temple Mount.”(Continue Reading)