The presentation is a case study of Jerusalem, the most destroyed and rebuilt city in history, and a major site for the three great monotheistic religions which are now adhered to by more than half the religious population of the world. Basic ideas of loss and restitution are briefly examined in the stories and laws of the Jewish, Christian and Moslem texts, as well as in some writing in psychiatry, and in the eschatologies arising from Jerusalem in particular. Some of these are then applied to four case studies of major shrines in Jerusalem: the built and imagined Temples of the Jews, destroyed and never rebuilt; the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre, frequently destroyed but constantly rebuilt; the Moslem buildings on the Haram-al-Sharif, threatened but never destroyed by human hands; and the Hurva synagogue, twice destroyed, and as of yet not rebuilt but involving important design proposals by famous architects over the past 25 years. Finally twelve general principles of the resilience of buildings are put forward, derived from both the religious and architectural evidence of Jerusalem.