We did continue digging alongside the Western Wall and we found a beautiful spot alongside the wall. Often in this spot you will be able to notice the women sitting at this place. Some of the women come here 4am - 5am and say the entire book of Psalms. They say the entire morning prayers or they sit here all day and say different prayers that have different meanings; sometimes cabbalistic meanings behind it. These very righteous women will come here daily. We sometimes find brides and grooms here asking for their future life to be successful and healthy in many ways. We sometimes find people come here to pray for health and specifically this place alongside the Western Wall because this location is 97 metres away from where the Holy of Holies stood.

Inside the Temple there were many different rooms. Each room had its purpose. As you get to walk further into the Temple you get to holier sites. Only one man was allowed to walk into that room called the Holy of Holies one day a year. That day was called Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

As a Jewish person I can tell you that all around the world we pray physically and spiritually towards this location. If we are standing in Jerusalem we pray towards Jerusalem as close as we can get to this place, but as we mentioned before, not only Jewish people come and pray at the Western Wall. The Western Wall is open to the entire public. Since we got an opportunity to open the Western Wall in 1967 we've opened the doors to everyone to come to pray here; to pray what they would like to pray. You can see that indicated by the notes at the Western Wall. We do not read the notes; the notes are taken out of the Western Wall twice a year and brought for burial on the Mount of Olives. These are treated as a prayer book that has been damaged. We do not throw them out, but we take them for burial. This specific location alongside the Western Wall is what we call a direct call home. This is the exact location right across that holy place. There is a saying in Hebrew, 'Our hearts follow our actions' and when we physically stand in this place something about our hearts open up. I can tell you from standing at this exact location now; I don't know if you feel it?

It is a very special thing to pray just here. We know that when King Solomon asked God to accept everyone's prayers, you would have expected King Solomon to ask for wealth and health for himself and his family, instead he asked for the entire nation and King David does the same thing. He is constantly asking for the nation and this is what we see the leaders did. The leaders tried to tell us 3,000 years ago that when we stop and pray, first we must pray for others; once we have others in mind then we can return and think about ourselves and ask of course for ourselves.

Once we continue we start the walk along side the Western Wall, this is the major tunnel that leads about 250 metres alongside the Western Wall tunnels. On the right hand side we see the original 2,000 year old Herodian stones. On the other side we see concrete. These were simply places to re-enforce what is on top. The pathway we are going to walk through is relatively narrow; it's the width of a wheelbarrow. It's just enough to have cleared out all the dirt and debris that had accumulated here in the last 700 years and was of course sifted out to find findings. The height is the height approximately of the tallest man that dug in this location.

As we start walking inside the Western Wall tunnels we will see two glass windows along the way. In the first glass window we will see the actual destruction that happened in Jerusalem in the year 70 AD and you can see the actual 2,000 year old stones that were pushed down from the wall during the destruction. They remain here till today and we haven't dug them out yet, but potentially there we can dig down maybe eight more metres till we get to the bedrock. There is still much more work to do. I have to tell you that with all the excavations we have done here alongside the Western Wall and in this area, this is our prime location. We do not dig underneath the Temple Mount or on the Temple Mount. According to Jewish law we are not allowed to go up to the Temple Mount today. We do not have the means to properly purify and that is why we come to the Western Wall, because the Western Wall is the closest we can get to the holiest place in the world where the Holy of Holies sat.

In the second window as we walk alongside the wall we are able to look down and see the Western Wall carrying down till the bedrock. When you stand on it, it will seem pretty deep to you, but have in mind the Western Wall is built on the slope of a mountain, very high up north and very low down south. That means when you are standing at the Western Wall plaza outside you have underneath you maybe three times the depth of what you see here, maybe 20, 25 metres of Western Wall that still has not been excavated.

As you continue alongside the wall, you'll walk through two small rooms; these rooms are not rooms' per-se, they are water cisterns that we have cut through in order to dig alongside the wall. You'll see the plaster on the walls and you'll be able to see the original openings to the homes that are now sealed as we have running water. You continue a little more alongside these Herodian stones to see the actual bedrock. This is the bedrock rising up from underneath the Western Wall and this is the first time we get an opportunity to see the real thing, to see where it all began. This is the actual mountain where God said to Abraham, 'Stop'. This is actually the same place where the offerings were brought on the top of this mountain and we get to touch it and stand alongside it and see what was done to it throughout the years.

When we reach what seems to be the end of the tunnel within the Western Wall tunnels, we reach part of a street. The street looks more like a room today. It has a ceiling and it has walls and a floor. The ceiling and most of the walls are arches holding up the homes of the Moslem Quarter and we can see as we walk in on our left hand side, two beautiful columns that remained here from the time of the Second Temple.

Paul: Why are there columns suddenly alongside the Western Wall?

Miri: The answer is in the floor that we are standing on right now, this beautiful pavement. These beautiful pavement stones are the original wall street of 2,000 years ago.

This was the market place where people used to come and do their shopping from out of town or in town and on the different holidays when we pilgrim to Jerusalem. This is the place that we would stand on. The marketplace of Jerusalem still exists today and we see a small segment of it here in the tunnels themselves.

In the middle of the street you meet bedrock. This isn't very typical for Herod or very convenient for anyone coming here. We see in the bedrock itself an etching - an actual carving in the stone. This happened when Herod died in the year 4 AD. King Herod dies and leaves everything behind. Josephus Flavius tells us that there were 18,000 unemployed people after Herod's death, so when he leaves, everyone just left their tools behind and went home and stopped working on this street. Only 54 years later was the street completed.

The street finally came to an end with the destruction of Jerusalem. In the year 70 when the Romans come, they destroy the entire city and the Jewish people fled. They have no choice but to stay here and I always picture between these two arches standing in the street, there might have been a shop and in this shop this one person who owns the shop here says, 'what do I do'? 'Do I leave everything behind, do I leave Jerusalem, my heart, or do I stay'? They choose to leave, but they left their hearts in Jerusalem. It's amazing to know that they took Jerusalem with them to everywhere they were scattered throughout the earth.