In 1901, in Ottoman Jerusalem, members of the wealthy Ades family funded the construction of a synagogue for Jews who had moved to the city from Aleppo, Syria. It was built off an alleyway near the open-air market of Mahaneh Yehuda, a neighborhood where the other houses of worship were little more than shacks; so although this one was barely the size of a small restaurant, it was called the â??Great Synagogue.â?
The woodwork inside the Ades (pronounced â??Addisâ?) Synagogue was intricate Damascene carpentry inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a reminder of the communityâ??s Syrian origins. The benches were not arranged facing the front, as in European synagogues, but rather in a rectangle, so that worshipers faced the small central platform where the cantor stood and where the Torah was read, and faced each other, in the more social style of the Middle East.
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