Pro-Wailing Wall Committee

The Pro–Wailing Wall Committee was established in Mandatory Palestine on 24 July 1929, by Joseph Klausner, professor of modern Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University, to promote Jewish rights at the Western Wall.

The committee created a programme of political activities organised and promoted by a loose coalition of Revisionist Zionists, religious Zionists and young people. It also spawned many branches, which held meetings throughout the country.

During the nineteenth century the Western Wall came to be viewed in Jewish circles as a site of commemoration and particular sanctity. It was also invested with national significance by the Jewish national movement. From the late nineteenth century onwards pictures and postcards often depicted a rebuilt Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, sometimes next to al-Aqsa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock and sometimes in their place. The heads of the Yeshivot in the Old Yishuv also used photomontages showing the Dome of the Rock with the Star of David and flags of Zion superimposed in fundraising appeals to Diaspora Jews. It thus came to be widely believed that a Jewish conspiracy was at work to replace the Muslim holy sites by a rebuilt Jewish Temple. The resulting tensions were exploited by both Palestinian Arab and Jewish nationalists.

Joseph Klausner was a member of the Odessa circle of political activists which included Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Ussishkin and although not a 'party man' he was a fellow traveller with Revisionist Zionism and contributed significantly to the Zionist education of Betar, the Revisionist youth movement, and nationalist youth in general. Klausner's background as an academic with expertise in the history of the Second Temple period and as an activist in Zionist polemics eventually brought him to the forefront of Jewish anger at the failure of the Zionist establishment in Palestine to resolve problems over access to, and arrangements for worship at, the Western Wall.

...
Wikipedia