Western Wall Webcam

Twice a year, before Passover and before Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi of the Western Wall and his staff work along the stones with wooden poles, easing out the folded prayer notes that visitors have pushed into the cracks. The notes are bagged and buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, and more than a million new ones fill the gaps again each year. The Western Wall live cam watches this wall, the Kotel, in the Old City of Jerusalem, with views of the stones, the prayer plaza in front of them and the covered prayer hall under Wilson’s Arch. It is the camera behind our Jerusalem live cams page.

What the Western Wall webcam shows: the Wall, the plaza and Wilson’s Arch

The player switches between three views. The first faces the Wall itself, the stretch of about 57 m (187 ft) where people pray, with the men’s section on the left and the women’s section on the right as you face the stones, divided by a partition. The stones you see are not all from the same era: the lowest seven courses above ground are Herodian, the four above them date from the Umayyad period, and the smaller stones at the top were added from the Mamluk period onward.

The second view takes in the Western Wall Plaza, the open square of about 20,000 square meters where tour groups gather and families bring boys for their bar mitzvah. The third looks inside Wilson’s Arch, the vaulted space to the left of the open-air section. A 2005 renovation turned it into a covered prayer hall, with a men’s area, a Torah ark holding more than 100 scrolls and a women’s gallery overlooking it.

Height is hard to judge on the Kotel live camera. The wall rises about 19 m (62 ft) above the plaza, in 28 visible courses, and another 17 courses continue below ground. One stone just north of Wilson’s Arch measures about 13.55 m long and is estimated at 250 to 300 tonnes.

From Herod’s retaining wall to the Kotel live stream

The Western Wall was built around 19 BCE, when Herod the Great enlarged the platform of the Second Temple and surrounded it with massive retaining walls. The full western wall runs for 488 m (1,601 ft), most of it hidden behind later buildings; the section on the live stream is the part left open for prayer. After the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, the wall became the closest accessible place to it, and it is known in Hebrew as HaKotel HaMa’aravi, in English as the Wailing Wall and in Arabic as the Buraq Wall.

Israel took control of the Old City in June 1967, during the Six-Day War, and the Moroccan Quarter in front of the wall was demolished to create the present plaza; the prayer area grew from about 120 square meters to 2,400. The Old City of Jerusalem and its walls were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1981 and have been on its list of sites in danger since 1982.

Two quieter sections lie outside the main frame. Robinson’s Arch, at the southern end, once carried a staircase up to the Temple Mount and has hosted non-Orthodox services since 2004. The Little Western Wall, an 8 m stretch near the Iron Gate in the Muslim Quarter, still shows much of its original Herodian masonry.

When the Western Wall live cam is busiest

The plaza follows the Jewish calendar more than the clock. Weekday mornings bring prayer groups at sunrise, and bar mitzvah celebrations often fill the plaza on Mondays and Thursdays, the days the Torah is read. On Friday evening, as Shabbat begins, the crowd grows again. Some Western Wall cameras stop broadcasting on Shabbat and Jewish holy days, so if the feed is paused between Friday evening and Saturday night, that is the likely reason.

The biggest crowds come on the holidays. The priestly blessing, Birkat Kohanim, is held at the wall on the pilgrimage festivals of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, when tens of thousands of people come; more than 100,000 gathered on Tisha B’Av in 2007, the fast that marks the Temple’s destruction, and a record 1.5 million visits were counted during the month of Tishrei in 2009. For other places of prayer that stream live, our religious site cams range from a parish church on Gozo to Higashi Honganji in Kyoto and the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad.

The next clearing of the notes comes before Passover in the spring, and the one after that in late summer, in the days before Rosh Hashanah. Those mornings are worth catching on the Western Wall live cam, and the rest of our live webcams from around the world are there when the plaza falls quiet for Shabbat.