How the Jewish Diaspora Kept Pilgrimage to Zion Alive

Related traditions: Judaism

Regions covered: Middle East, Europe, North Africa

The Absence That Shaped Everything

When Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jewish pilgrimage did not simply end — it was transformed from a practice into a longing. The three annual festivals continued to be observed throughout the diaspora, but now the prayers accompanying them were saturated with the language of return. “Because of our sins we were exiled from our land,” the festival liturgy declared, recasting the historical catastrophe as a theological condition and the journey to Jerusalem as an unfulfilled obligation that weighed on every generation.

This longing was not abstract. It was embedded in the physical practices of daily Jewish life. Jews prayed facing Jerusalem. The wedding ceremony included the breaking of a glass in memory of the Temple’s destruction. When building a home, a section of wall was left unplastered as a memorial. The annual fast of Tisha B’Av — the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, marking the date of both the First and Second Temples’ destruction — required mourning customs identical to those for a close relative: sitting on the floor, refraining from bathing and leather shoes, reading the Book of Lamentations by candlelight. These practices made the absence of the Temple, and the impossibility of pilgrimage, a felt reality rather than an ancient memory.

Medieval Travelers

Despite the dangers and difficulties, individual Jews undertook pilgrimages to the Land of Israel throughout the medieval period. These journeys were not obligatory — rabbinic authority was divided on whether the commandment to dwell in the land applied in the absence of the Temple — but they were understood as acts of extraordinary devotion, and those who made them were regarded with reverence.

Benjamin of Tudela, a rabbi from Navarre in the Iberian Peninsula, traveled from approximately 1159 to 1173, visiting Jewish communities from southern France through Italy, Constantinople, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and back. His account, the Sefer ha-Massa’ot (Book of Travels), provides the most detailed contemporary description of medieval Jewish life across the Mediterranean and Near East. His descriptions of Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, and the Galilee — noting their small numbers, their poverty, and their persistence — constitute a pilgrimage narrative embedded within a broader travelogue.

Nachmanides (Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman), the great Catalan Talmudist and Kabbalist, emigrated to the Land of Israel in 1267, arriving in a devastated Jerusalem where he found only two Jewish inhabitants. He established a synagogue — the Ramban Synagogue in the Old City, which still functions today — and wrote to his son describing the desolation of the holy sites and the act of faith required to see holiness in ruin. Nachmanides’ journey exemplifies the medieval paradox of Jewish pilgrimage to Zion: the land was sacred, the journey was dangerous, the destination was broken, and the act of going was understood as both mourning and hope.

Meshullam of Volterra, an Italian Jewish merchant, traveled to the Holy Land in 1481 and left a detailed account of pilgrim practices at the Western Wall, Rachel’s Tomb, the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and the tombs of the righteous in the Galilee. His descriptions establish that by the late fifteenth century, the circuit of Jewish holy sites that remains the basis of religious tourism in Israel today was already well established.

The Kabbalistic Intensification

The sixteenth-century settlement of Kabbalists in Safed — Isaac Luria, Moses Cordovero, Joseph Caro, and their disciples — introduced a new dimension to Jewish pilgrimage in the Land of Israel. These mystics did not merely visit holy sites; they invested the landscape with Kabbalistic meaning, identifying tombs, springs, caves, and mountains as points of connection with the sefirot (divine attributes) and with the souls of the righteous who were buried there. Luria developed the practice of prostrating on the graves of sages and communing with their spirits, receiving mystical revelations through this contact.

The Safed Kabbalists also formalized the pilgrimage to Meron on Lag BaOmer and created liturgical practices — such as the midnight Tikkun Chatzot prayer, recited in mourning for the Temple and the Shekhinah in exile — that intensified the emotional texture of life in the Holy Land. Their influence spread throughout the diaspora through their writings, their students, and the prayer books they composed, which gradually became standard in Jewish communities worldwide. The Kabbalistic layer meant that when a Jew in Poland or Morocco prayed for the restoration of Jerusalem, the prayer carried not only the weight of biblical obligation but the accumulated mystical charge of centuries of longing.

Aliyah as Pilgrimage

The line between pilgrimage and immigration has always been blurred in Jewish tradition. The Hebrew word aliyah — ascent — describes both the biblical pilgrim’s journey to the Temple and the modern immigrant’s relocation to Israel. This linguistic continuity is not coincidental. Many of the early waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, beginning in the 1880s, were motivated by religious impulses that drew directly on the pilgrimage tradition. The settlers of the First Aliyah (1882-1903), though often influenced by secular nationalism as well, used the language of return and redemption that had animated Jewish pilgrimage for centuries.

The ultra-Orthodox communities that established themselves in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias — the four “holy cities” of Jewish tradition — understood their presence explicitly as a fulfillment of the pilgrimage imperative. They lived in poverty, supported by charitable donations (halukka) from diaspora communities, and devoted themselves to prayer, study, and the maintenance of a Jewish presence at the holy sites. Their role was not to build a state but to hold the ground — to ensure that Jewish pilgrimage to Zion remained a living practice rather than a purely literary aspiration.

The Seder Table and the Wall

The most widespread expression of pilgrimage longing in diaspora Judaism requires no journey at all. At the conclusion of the Passover Seder, Jews in every corner of the world recite the phrase “L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim” — “Next year in Jerusalem.” The declaration is simultaneously a prayer, a statement of faith, and an acknowledgment of incompleteness. It says: we are here, but we belong there. The pilgrimage is unfinished.

After the Six-Day War of 1967 and the capture of the Old City, Jewish access to the Western Wall was restored for the first time since 1948. The wall became the focus of a revived pilgrimage practice — not the Temple pilgrimage of antiquity, with its sacrifices and priestly liturgy, but a modern pilgrimage of prayer, memory, and national identity. The custom of placing written prayers in the wall’s crevices, the mass gatherings on festivals, and the bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies conducted at the wall’s plaza all represent contemporary expressions of the pilgrimage impulse that the destruction of the Temple interrupted but could not extinguish.

The relationship between ancient pilgrimage and modern practice remains a subject of theological reflection. For religious Zionists, the establishment of the State of Israel and the return to Jerusalem represent a stage in the process of redemption, with the full restoration of the Temple pilgrimage still anticipated. For ultra-Orthodox communities, the redemption is not yet at hand, and the current state of affairs — prayer at the wall rather than sacrifice at the altar — represents continuation of exile rather than its resolution. For secular Israelis, the pilgrimage heritage is a cultural inheritance stripped of its theological framework, visible in the national celebration of the biblical festivals and the integration of ancient pilgrimage routes into the national hiking trail system. Each position draws on the same tradition and arrives at a different understanding of what the pilgrimage to Zion means now.

Yishuv — The Jewish community in the Land of Israel prior to the establishment of the state. The “Old Yishuv,” concentrated in the four holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias, understood its presence as a form of permanent pilgrimage — maintaining Jewish worship at the sacred sites on behalf of the entire diaspora.

Halukka — The system of charitable distribution that supported the Old Yishuv. Diaspora communities contributed funds that were distributed to scholars and their families living in the Holy Land, enabling them to devote themselves to study and prayer rather than commerce. The system linked diaspora Jews to the Land of Israel through financial participation in the pilgrimage project.

Tikkun Chatzot — The midnight prayer of mourning for the Temple’s destruction and the exile of the Shekhinah, formalized by the Safed Kabbalists. Recited by candlelight on the floor, often facing Jerusalem, the prayer enacts the grief of interrupted pilgrimage in the most intimate possible setting.

Kivrei Tzaddikim — The tombs of the righteous, which became the primary destinations of Jewish pilgrimage in the Land of Israel after the Temple’s destruction. The practice of visiting these graves — praying, lighting candles, leaving written petitions — transferred some of the devotional energy of Temple pilgrimage to sites scattered across the Galilee, Judea, and beyond.