Origins
At turn of the 20th century,many of Syria's Jewish community had emigrated, fleeing persecution arising from blood libels and to escape the economic downturn which arrived with the decline of the Ottoman Empire. While many settled in England, the United States or Latin America, some families moved to the Holy Land. Most community members were laborers, shopkeepers or merchants.
After some time, the synagogue was officially established in 1901 by a community of Jews from Aleppo, Syria. It is named after two cousins who financed the building: Ovadiah Josiah Ades and Yosef Isaac Ades. Yosef Ades was a wealthy man with connections in the Ottoman administration and a member of the City Council of Jerusalem. The new synagogue was designed as a neighborhood institution, and at the time, was considered one of the most beautiful synagogues in Jerusalem. Although solidly constructed, the synagogue suffered damage in World War I and Israel's War of Independence. Today the synagogue is attended not only by Aleppian Jews, but by many different types of Sephardic Jews (e.g. Kurdish); nevertheless, the liturgy of the congregation remains Aleppian in its purest form.
Read more about this topic: Ades Synagogue
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)