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For today's
ABC Wednesday let "A" be for
Av, for today is
Tisha B'Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av.
As we saw in the previous post, this is a sad day on which many Jews fast and mourn the destruction of ancient Jerusalem and of her First and Second Temples.
Recently I explored the Romema neighborhood with its grand old houses, begun in 1921.
Something about this building--maybe the open door with the star of David or the sunlight on the old tiles or a sense of mystery--beckoned me to enter and go up the stairs.
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The house seemed to be shared by four families now.
Four apartments.
But what surprised and moved me even more was what I found on the wall, near the ceiling.
The Hebrew on the tiles translates to
A REMEMBRANCE OF THE DESTRUCTION [i.e. of the Temple]
IF I FORGET YOU O JERUSALEM, LET MY RIGHT HAND FORGET HER CUNNING [Psalm 137:5].
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The famous Psalm 137 illustrated!
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"By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
'Sing us one of the songs of Zion! . . . ' "
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This is so appropriate for today, Tisha B'Av, the day on which the Temple was destroyed and following which many of Jerusalem's Jews were taken to exile in Babylon!
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When I returned home from Romema, I Googled and made yet another moving discovery!
"Following the fall of the Second Temple, sages of the period declared that every new building must carry a reminder of that destruction: an unpainted area measuring one cubit by one cubit . . . . Many religious Jews take this edict literally and leave an unplastered or black square on their walls. The picture you see embedded into the wall of Fishman-Maimon’s residence--ceramic tiles showing the River of Babylon, harps and weeping willows--[is one of these]."
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Furthermore, our Museum of Italian Jewish Art shows an
example in carved marble and says,
"Writings of this kind were common in Germany and Poland, while in Italian synagogues, as well as private houses, part of a wall was usually left unplastered in order to remember the destruction of the Temple."
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So . . . we remember and do not forget.
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UPDATE 2014:
Another nice explanation is here, at
Jewish Treats.
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I found a toasted turtle (dead),
fried figs,
and stripped stones in ancient terrace walls all up and down the hills.
After clicking on this photo you should see a shadow lion on the stone.
The benches are in a little garden inside Jerusalem's old Nachlaot neighborhood.
Kristine popped out of her room at 7:00 p.m.
I did, however, take a look BEHIND the wardrobe and found--no, not a lion--but a nest!
At 6:55 a.m. the already-risen sun, playing with clouds, was turning the Sea of Galilee silver. 
The full moon rose at 8 o'clock last Sunday over our neighbor mountain in the Jerusalem Hills.
Just five hours before that same moonrise, that same mountain was enveloped in smoke. 
Besides burning 250 acres of woodland, it totalled several dozen cars.
Look how close to the Hadassah Medical Center buildings the fire came!
They were on high alert, ready to evacuate the patients if necessary. 
A long white chicken coop in my moshav is visible through what was the window of the car. 
--a bench on a bima.
Above the holy ark, where the Torah scrolls reside, the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem has a magnificent stained glass window.
It is an Orthodox place, so the men sit here and the women are in the balcony above.
Big buildings, bound together.
There were Persian carpets everywhere, hundreds of them!
Suspended from the railings,
strewn on the stairs,
slung on benches,
and sometimes even stacked ten-high on the floor! 
This cute Tabriz round carpet, only one meter across, struck my fancy.
A forest fire is burning just outside two sides of my village!
The neighboring moshavim/villages up on the mountain were being evacuated as of 3:00.
I walked closer to take pictures and could see the flames and hear the shouts of the fire fighters in the forest right above the gate to our moshav. 
Back in the 18th century, mystic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov taught
What an ingenious way to provide clear cool water to the many cats that roam the Hebrew University campus!
Cats feel safe and right at home on the Givat Ram campus.
Kristine and Mark didn't notice they were covered in little checkerboard shadows that were just right for Shadow Shot Sunday.
This is what they were looking at and hearing about--the Holyland model of Jerusalem as it may have looked in the year 66 C.E.
Please click to read about the model.
Visitors stand and gaze in wonder at the size and majesty of the Second Temple.
I was there just a few weeks ago and you still saw construction everywhere.
Look, something new!
The plaque on his house in the old Jerusalem neighborhood of Nachlaot says so.
Here, you can enlarge it and see him, the smallest boy in the 1925 photo. 
Gilboa street (with the Navon house showing on the left) shows the tell-tale convex paving, meaning a cistern is below. 
Sir Moses (Moshe) Montefiore gave money to build the Ohel Moshe section of the Nachlaot quarter, and it is named after him.
Recently I explored the Romema neighborhood with its grand old houses, begun in 1921.
The house seemed to be shared by four families now.
But what surprised and moved me even more was what I found on the wall, near the ceiling. 
The famous Psalm 137 illustrated!
This diorama in the museum of Hechal Shlomo shows details of how the Roman troops commanded by Titus, son of Emperor Vespasian, storm the city walls of Jerusalem in the year 70.
The figures and war machines are all in miniature, so please click the photos to understand the detail.
The battering ram battered the gates. 
Josephus writes that during that siege of Jerusalem General Titus, at one point, crucified 500 or more Jews a day. So many Jews were crucified outside the walls that "there was not enough room for the crosses and not enough crosses for the bodies" (Wars of the Jews 5:11.1).
