Tisha B'av

Observances minor which rise not form the Law of Moses but from events at the close of
Bible times or afterward. The three post-Mosaic holy days are Ninth of Ab, Purim, and Hanukah. Their Laws of observance are less stringent than those of the major festivals.
You might call this day the Pearl Harbor of Jewry. The Babylonians on the Ninth of Ab, 586 BCE. broke into the Temple of Solomon and sacked it. Six hundred and fifty-five years later, on the same date, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. This fate coincidence linking the nation’s two greatest disasters has left an ineradicable scar on the memory of the Jews.
They mark the Ninth of Ab by a fast and by all the Yom Kippur abstinences, though there is no work stoppage. Some eat no meat during the first nine days of this month. The very pious observe mourning customs: letting bear and hair grow and avoiding festive events in the three weeks between the seventeenth of Tammuz (when the army of Nebuchadnezzar breached the walls of Jerusalem) and this day.
In the last meal before the fast, one dish is eaten sprinkled with ashes; often an egg, symbol of dumb grief and of the rolling changes of fortune. The congregation assembles after sundown in a darkened Synagogue, shuffling on skippered feet, talking in the hushed tones of people in a house of death. There are no greetings, no handshaking’s, no smiles. After evening prayers, the congregants sit on low stools or on the floor, touch ashes to their foreheads, and with candles or flashlights follow the chanting of the dirge over Jerusalem, the book of Lamentations. They sing medieval mourning songs, the Keenos, with funeral melodies. They leave the Synagogue as silently as they came and disperse to their homes without farewells.
In the morning service the men pray without phylacteries and shawls, as men do who have not yet buried their dead. They wear these at the afternoon service, the one day in the year when this occurs. Like the other minor holy days, the Ninth of Ab carries no Mosaic restrictions on labor or travel. Most people go about their business after worship, though the devout meditate through the first day on Scriptures like Jeremiah and Job.
The Ninth of Ab falls in July or August.
Jewish national memory is long and it is not likely that the grim date of the capture of Jerusalem and the ruin of two Temples will be forgotten.