JERUSALEM — Once a year, usually just before Hanukkah and Christmas, a handful of Jerusalem postal workers leave their dreary letter-sorting station for a few hours and head to the Western Wall.
Boxes in hand, they haul the thousands of letters addressed to "God, Jerusalem Israel," "the Almighty," or "the Wailing Wall," among others. At the wall, the second-holiest in Judaism after the adjoining Temple Mount, the workers separate by gender, going either to the men’s or women’s prayer sections. An arm’s length from the wall’s ancient stones, where dozens of people are deep in prayer, they carefully open the envelopes, fold the letters until they are slivers and insert them into the crevices.