On 30 August in the year 70, during the Roman siege led by Titus, the Second Temple in Jerusalem was set on fire and destroyed. Many thousands of people died in the siege and in the months of hunger that preceded it, and many of those who lived were carried away as captives. That is the fact, and it should be said before anything else.
I can only describe what is left. Below the western wall of the Temple Mount there is a paved street, and lying on it are great Herodian ashlars, some the length of a room, where they came down. They were not carted off or reused. If you crouch close you can still see the margins the masons cut around each face, a narrow dressed border a few centimetres wide, worked so evenly that the wall would read as a grid of shadow lines in the morning. Someone stood on scaffolding with a chisel and made those edges true. The stones kept them through the fall and through nineteen centuries on the pavement.
The relief below shows a procession carrying spoils on poles, a seven-branched menorah on a stepped base, a table, trumpets held up. It was carved by Roman hands to be looked at in Rome. What it records is a loss that is still counted and named each year, on a summer fast, by people who have never stopped remembering it.
Thank you, Fabien. The day is kept each year on the ninth of Av, a fast from sunset to sunset, and in many congregations Lamentations is read aloud in a low chant, sometimes by candlelight, with the reader seated on the floor rather than standing at the desk.
Nearly everything we can say about that day comes from one man, Josephus, who watched from the Roman side and wrote it out later in Rome. A difficult source, and the only close one we have; the loss would be far less known without him.