Western Wall gets a Passover cleaning, notes to be buried on Mount of Olives

The Western Wall Heritage Foundation on Sunday removed six months' worth of notes left by those who come to pray at the wall.

This removal is done twice annually - once in the fall to make room for more notes, and once in the spring as part of the Passover cleaning process, according to the Western Wall Heritage Foundation (WWHF). 

The letters are collected using gloves and disposable wooden utensils. They are deposited into sacks and buried in a genizah - a resting place for discarded Jewish texts - on the Mount of Olives.

The removal process, per the WWHF, is personally overseen by the rabbi of the Western Wall, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz. 

Hundreds of thousands of notes are placed inside the cracks in the wall each year by tourists and Israeli citizens alike, who subscribe to a wide variety of belief systems.