The Jewish people were scattered to 70 different countries they say, to the four corners of the world. Throughout the years the yearning for Jerusalem, the love for this city just grew further and further and I think it was actually the strongest in 1967. That is the year after 2,000 years of yearning we got an opportunity during the 6-day war to come back to the Western Wall.

At this point you are nearing the end of the tour and we meet the quarry where they carved stones for the Western Wall. You continue a bit more along and then you are forced to turn left because we never completed the excavation of the Western Wall. This is simply because the Western Wall was never completely built. We do not know of an existing Western/Northern corner wall; maybe because we never found it or maybe because it was never built.

In the early 90's we discovered an ancient aqueduct that goes back at least 2,200 years to the days of the Maccabees in Jerusalem, maybe even from King Solomon. This man-made aqueduct used to lead water from northern pools in Jerusalem into the Temple Mount itself. It was only partially closed down by King Herod by building a dam years later. Until then it was active and brought water to the Temple. You have to realise that when the Temple stood, you needed water for many different purposes like cleanliness and ritual baths.

This is the holiest place in the world and in Jerusalem what can we do? It does not have a lot of water naturally, so we were very happy to find this evidence of how the actual life was in Jerusalem at the time. When King Herod closed it he built a pool and that is the next room we walk into. This is the pool that collected water coming from the different pools and prevented it from coming to the Western Wall once it was built. When you go in there you are going to see a very small segment of the pool. In front of you, you will see a wall and on the other side of the wall is the monastery of the Sister's of Zion. You will probably see 2/3rds of the pool on the other side. The reason there is a wall there is simply because the monastery did not know what the Western Wall tunnels were 150 years ago. It wasn't dug yet and they knew there was a pool and didn't know where it led to so they decided to close it off to prevent unwanted guests coming in.

The exit of the Western Wall tunnels leads to the Via Dolorosa street. This was opened in 1996 and enabled us to bring many more visitors to come and see the Western Wall tunnels.

Paul: Do you have a website for those who would like to know more?

Miri: Yes and on this website you can see the Western Wall live. We have a live webcam at the Western Wall 24/6 as we say, because it is not active on the Sabbath. We have a wonderful opportunity for people to write notes and send them through our website and they are placed daily at the Western Wall. If you have an I Phone you can download the Western Wall APP and send a note sitting on the tube and within moments it is received here at the Western Wall and placed within the stones.