Access, and Who Decides How Prayer Happens There

The history of the site is largely a history of access. Under Ottoman and then British rule Jewish worship at the wall was permitted but constrained, conducted in a narrow alley rather than an open space, and subject to restrictions on what furniture and screens could be brought, which were themselves the subject of repeated dispute and of official inquiry.

Between 1948 and 1967, with the Old City under Jordanian control, Jewish access ceased entirely. After 1967 the alley and the adjacent houses were cleared and the present broad plaza was created, and visitation grew to a scale the wall had not seen in centuries. Montefiore's account covers that sequence. The atlas records what the catalogued sources establish and stops there. Arrangements at the plaza today, including how the space is divided, which forms of prayer are conducted where, and who exercises authority over those decisions, are matters of continuing public and legal argument in Israel, and this atlas holds no catalogued source that settles them. The atlas notes the dispute as live rather than describing an arrangement that may not be current, and does not present any party's position as the established one. That reticence is deliberate. A site where several communities each hold that their practice is the correct one is exactly where a reference work does damage by picking a winner, and the honest entry is one that names the disagreement without resolving it.