This small church symbolically recalls Jesus weeping over the destruction of
Jerusalem. The name, Dominus Flevit - "the Lord wept" - is taken from
Luke XIX: 41. Built in the immediate vicinity of an older Byzantine church it
includes part of the remains and some sections of mosaic from the earlier
church. The church was built in 1954 to the design of Antonio Berluzzi, who has
many churches dotted all over Israel. The four corner, white pinnacles resemble
tear drops. The church grounds yielded quite a few interesting archæological
finds: a burial cave from the middle and late bronze ages (1500-1200 BCE), which
puts it slightly before the Israelite period - together with sarcophagi and
ossuaries from different periods; finds from the end of the Second Temple period
(up to 70 CE); tens of Hebrew inscriptions in Aramaic and Greek - also from the
Second Temple period; and the remains of a Byzantine monastery from the 5th
century CE. The church of Dominus Flevit is unique in that the altar faces west,
towards the Temple Mount and not east, as is usually the case, in order to
symbolize the scene as Jesus saw it. To the left of the church and slightly
lower down can be seen the very distinctive "onion" domes of the Russian
Orthodox church of Mary Magdalene and beyond, climbing up to the eastern wall of
the Temple Mount, on the other side of the Kidron Valley, can be seen the Moslem
graveyard which stretches virtually the entire length of the eastern wall of the
Old City.
