Jewish TV personality and food expert Adam Richman visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem and wrote a heart-filled post about the experience on Instagram Monday.
The former host of the Travel Channel series “Man v. Food” said he had been waiting to visit the holy site since 1987, when his grandfather wanted to take the whole family to Jerusalem to have Richman’s bar mitzvah at the Western Wall. However a terror attack months before derailed their plans and the trip never happened.
Standing at the Western Wall this week, during his first trip to Israel, Richman, 45, said, “I was unprepared for the scope of emotion..I kid you not-the moment I laid my palm upon the bricks, I began to weep. Being there, at the western retaining wall of the Temple mount, so close to the observance of the Tisha B’Av holiday, where we commemorate the destruction of the temples, you could feel, even among the other worshipers, that this was a very special time.”
The Brooklyn native added, “I can only say I walked away from that wall feeling very different then the man who had walked up to it barely an hour before.”
Richman wrote more about the whole experience in a lengthy post.