Who does the Western Wall belong to?

The Women of the Wall would have us believe that they are defending the Western Wall for everyone.

Considering that after 25 years and massive public relations efforts the group can hardly gather 100 women on a good month, the assertion sounds ludicrous.

Can you imagine so small a fringe group demanding to do as it pleases at the Vatican? Westminster Abbey? St.Patrick’s Cathedral in New York? Mecca? At any place of worship in the world? That’s not freedom of religion, that’s anarchy! The Women of the Wall can argue all they want that the Kotel is not a synagogue and has no tradition.

There is a 1,700-year-long documented history of Jewish prayer along the Western Wall and at least 500 years of a prayer tradition at the current location. Lest you think the Jews prayed in the Reform fashion until the evil haredim (ultra-Orthodox) showed up and usurped the power, think again. There is ample photographic evidence to prove it.

The time has come to state the truth, simple and unadorned: The Western Wall doesn’t belong to the Women of the Wall. The Western Wall belongs to its 10 million visitors a year, who respect the sanctity and decorum of the site. The Western Wall belongs to millions of Jewish women and men, who come to pray here every day and oppose introducing any changes to the site. These people come to reaffirm their connection with the spiritual, to unburden themselves of their troubles, to reconnect with God on His terms, following the footsteps of their ancestors for generations.

You can’t prove anything on line. One can only inform. There is a nice wikipedia article on Solomon’s Stables.

During the Umayyad reign, this reservoir was converted into a prayer hall (mussalah) and was named the Marwani Mussalah, by the Islamic Umayyad Khalifa, Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, along with the Dome of the Rock.[4][not in citation given] It remained so until the Crusaders converted it in 1099 into a stable for the infantry. The rings for tethering horses can still be seen on some of the pillars. The place used to be accessed from the single-panel gate located in the southern wall of al-Aqsa Mosque, which is also the southern wall of the Marwani mussalah.

The structure has been called Solomon’s Stables since Crusader times as a historical composite. ‘Solomon’s’ refers to the First Temple built on the site, while the ‘stables’ refers to the functional usage of the space by the Crusaders in the time of Baldwin II (King of Jerusalem 1118-1131 CE).

And from the Wikipedia article on “Antonia Fortress”...
Ernest L. Martin asserts a controversial claim in his book, “The Temples that Jerusalem Forgot”,[10] that the Ophel Mound is the site of the First and Second Temples and what is called the Temple Mount today was in fact the Roman Fort Antonia. His work set off a firestorm of discussion because Martin asserted that the Temple Mount was not the location of the last Temple. This work had even more importance due to the prior relationship between Martin and Herbert W. Armstrong whose editorial in The Plain Truth magazine had been cited by Denis Michael Rohan for his excuse to set fire to the Al Aqsa mosque during the 1960s.

The basis of this work began with the first visit by Martin to Jerusalem in 1961 when he first met Benjamin Mazar and later his son Ory Mazar, who informed him of his belief that the Temples of Solomon and Zerubbabel were located on the Ophel mound to the north of the original Mount Zion on the southeast ridge. Ory Mazar informed Martin that his father had also inclined to this belief before his death. In 1996 Martin wrote a draft report to support this theory. He wrote: “I was then under the impression that Simon the Hasmonean (along with Herod a century later) moved the Temple from the Ophel mound to the Dome of the Rock area.”

However, after studying the words of Josephus concerning the Temple of Herod the Great, which was reported to be in the same general area of the former Temples, he then read the account of Eleazar who led the final contingent of Jewish resistance to the Romans at Masada which stated that the Roman fortress was the only structure left by 73 CE “With this key in mind, I came to the conclusion in 1997 that all the Temples were indeed located on the Ophel mound over the area of the Gihon Spring”.[11]

From these conclusions Martin produced his book in which he asserted that the Temples of Jerusalem were located over the Gihon Spring and not over the Dome of the Rock. He wrote: “What has been amazing to me is the vast amount of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian records that remain available from the first to the sixteenth centuries that clearly vindicate the conclusions that I have reached in this book of research.”

So the Solomon’s Stables either date from the time of the first Crusade, or are the location of the Antonia Fortress, dating from the time that a suck-up to Mark Antony named it.

Your choice.

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