The ugly duckling - The museum version😉🦆 #Museum_of_Fairy_Tales (fb)

Jerusalem Day symbolizes our return to the city after a long exile. The swift - a brown bird with a green sheen, a white patch on its throat and a fork-like tail - represents this symbolism in its annual return, for thousands of years, to nest in the Western Wall. This is a bird that never rests for a moment - it eats, drinks, cleans itself and even sleeps while flying. Flight stops only to lay eggs and nest. Its chicks need a high wall like the Western Wall in order to fall, gather momentum and begin to fly. A magnificent spectacle occurs in the early morning hours and again toward sunset when the swifts fly as a flock in circles above the heads of the worshippers while making loud whistles. The return of the swifts each year to the Western Wall, some 3000 years after they were mentioned by the prophet Jeremiah who prophesied the destruction, as they soar above the descendants of the exiles who returned and rebuilt the city, is nothing short of a dream come true. (fb)