Architecture and Layout
This synagogue was built in the Byzantine period, perhaps as early as the 9th century. Damaged in the Mongol sack of Aleppo in 1400, it underwent extensive changes in 1405-1418. With the arrival of the Sephardim in Aleppo in the 16th century, a wing on the eastern side of the main courtyard was built. On the southern part of this wing, facing Jerusalem, is a small room known as the "cave of Elijah." In a central spacious courtyard, surrounded by porticoes, is a raised, covered reader's platform around which the congregation sat. It was in this form that Della Valle viewed the synagogue. It remained essentially unchanged until it was looted and burned in the riots of 1947.
The synagogue included from the very beginning an adjacent courtyard that was used as an open-air synagogue in the summertime. According to the Talmud, it was customary for a synagogue to have its roof removed during the summer (Baba Batra, 3:2), except for over the Holy Ark and the elevated reading platform for the cantor.
The synagogue edifice was divided into three main sections: a central courtyard that separated the western wing, where in modern times the musta'arabi community used to worship, from the eastern section built at a later time during the 16th century and which served as Beth Midrash and prayer hall of the “Francos”, i.e. Sephardi Jews that settled in the town after the Spanish exile and other European Jews that happened to sojourn in Aleppo. An additional enclosed small courtyard was bordering the eastern wing farther to the east.
The western hall had three heichaloth (Holy Arks); there were another three heichaloth on the southern wall (“the Zion Wall”) of the courtyard, and a seventh Holy Ark, located in the eastern wing close to the courtyard, also on the southern wall pointing to the direction of Jerusalem that was named Cave of Eliyahu or Heichal/Me'arat Eliyahu. Here old Sifrei Torah and Bible manuscripts (Keter) were kept. It is here where the Aleppo codex was housed for over five hundred years until 1947. Keter Aram Soba (The Aleppo Codex) is considered the most authoritative manuscript of the Masoretic text of the Bible. The Jews believed that the day that the Aleppo Codex gets removed from Aleppo is the day that their community will be destroyed. It turns out that this actually occurred.
Read more about this topic: Central Synagogue Of Aleppo
Famous quotes containing the words architecture and and/or architecture:
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)