The Rabbi of the Western Wall, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, said: The Western Wall is a prayer site for Jews and non-Jews. The shofar was also blown, a symbolic act usually done to ask God for mercy. COURTESY PHOTO.
Nearly 1000 people gathering on Sunday at the Western Wall in Jerusalem to pray for a cure to combat the coronavirus outbreak that has has killed 1,770 people and infected more than 71,000 people globally,
Times of Israel, an Israel-based online English-language newspaper reported on Tuesday that despite a downpour, nearly a thousand people participated in the prayer, along with dozens of Chinese citizens who are in the country.
“Millions and millions of people are going through tremendous suffering in China and outside China,” Rabbi Avi Berman, executive director of the Israeli branch of the Orthodox Union, told The Jerusalem Post. “As Jews, we believe that God has the power to send healing. We are not doctors, but we can pray.”
“The Western Wall is a payer site for Jews and non-Jews,” Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of the Western Wall, told The Jerusalem Post. . “We pray that China will overcome the [coronavirus] and that it will not spread in China or elsewhere around the world.”
Fox News reported that believers faced the wall with a poster in Hebrew and Chinese reading, “The People of Israel pray for China,” and recited prayers in Hebrew, and one in Mandarin, and sang and danced, in the session that ended with a blast of the shofar.
“There are many doctors and many physicians and many medical experts in the world trying to find a cure for this coronavirus. What we know how to do well is we know how to pray, we know how to talk to God,” Berman told those gathered, according to Fox News.
“We’re going to pray that the doctors are going to be successful,” he added. “Those that are looking for a cure are going to be successful.”
The Chinese Embassy in Israel extended its sincere appreciation for the sympathy, support and solidarity expressed by the Jewish people.
“We will never forget it,” the embassy said in to a statement seen by Fox News.
