by Dave Bender
JERUSALEM, Sept. 6 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of thousands of small slips of paper are bound tightly together among the crevices of row-upon-row of Herodian-era stones that make up the lower section of the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City.
Once called the Wailing Wall for Jews whose generations of tearful prayer dampened the stones, the Kotel as it's now commonly known in Hebrew, is the retaining wall holding up the western side of the Temple Mount.
It is now topped by the golden Dome of the Rock and nearby silver-domed al-Aqsa Mosque, sacred to Islam.
But there, the First and Second Temples stood until the latter' s destruction by the Romans in the year 70 AD, marking the beginning of the Jewish Exile until the modern era and the advent of the third Jewish Commonwealth - the State of Israel.
It is the closest spot to the ancient Holy of Holies which the faithful believe housed the Ten Commandments, and from which The Divine Presence still emanates out to the world.
And so, in a centuries-old Jewish tradition, thousands upon thousands of personal prayers and blessings, hopes and dreams are tightly folded and pushed into the Wall's well-worn cracks and fissures. Each note is a fervent plea for health, wealth, a mate, a child and any of a million other requests of the Almighty.
Some of the notes are printed on expensive paper delivered by airmail or by hand.
