Want to be Closer to the Kotel? There’s an App for That

By Michael Kaminer December 30, 2010

Using your iPhone to place a note inside the Western Wall sounds terrific, except for squeezing the mobile device into one of those crannies.

The Western Wall Heritage Foundation, which administers the wall, has a better idea: A new iPhone app that “allows users to send e-mails to be placed in the crevices of the old wall, a Jewish custom,” according to the Associated Press. The messages won’t just be symbolic gestures; “both the notes that are received through the website and those that are received on the new iPhone application are printed out and are physically placed between the stones of the Western Wall,” the Foundation’s Mimi Schler told the Forward in an e-mail.

The app “streams live from the site around the clock,” the AP reports, except on the Sabbath and holidays, when transmissions are forbidden. “It also includes a compass that allows users to pray in the direction of Jerusalem, another Jewish practice.” The Western Wall rabbi, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, welcomed the initiative, according to Israel news site ArutzSheva. “The Western Wall has been in the heart of every Jew in the world for 2,000 years,” he said. “It is only natural that in the technological age there will be ways to express the love and devotion of the Jewish people to the Western Wall and to Jerusalem. We hope that the new application will strengthen the younger generation’s bond to the Kotel.”

The application is available in Hebrew, English, and Russian, and may be downloaded free of charge from the iTunes store. No word on whether the app can accommodate virtual bar- and bat-mitzvahs.

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