Background on the Hurva Synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem

The Hurva Synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem will be rededicated Monday (March 15).[1]

Jerusalem’s Jewish residents completed the synagogue in 1864, originally named the Bet Yaakov Synagogue, but it was destroyed in 1948 by Jordanian forces.[2]

It is located in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, more than a thousand feet (three hundred meters) west of the Western Wall, the Temple Mount compound and the al-Aqsa Mosque (see map).

Map courtesy of Google Earth

The synagogue is not located near the Temple Mount compound. Nevertheless, a senior Palestinian leader is inciting unrest in response to the rededication. Khatem Abd el-Kader, a Fatah official with responsibility for Jerusalem, encouraged Palestinians to “converge on al Aksa to save it” from “Israeli attempts to destroy the mosque and replace it with the [Jewish] temple.”[3] He called the Hurva synagogue rededication a “provocation,” cautioning that Israel is “playing with fire.”[4]

During the Israeli War of Independence of 1948-1949, the Jordanian Arab Legion besieged the Old City of Jerusalem, defeated the Jewish forces and expelled the 1,200 residents of the Jewish Quarter in May 1948.[5]

Between 1948 and 1967, Jordanian forces destroyed 58 synagogues in the Jewish quarter of the Old City and destroyed 38,000 Jewish tombstones on the Mount of Olives. Some of the tombstones were used to build fences and floor latrines for the Jordanian army as well as to pave roads. Gravestones that were more than 1,000 years old were destroyed. Access to the Western Wall and other places of worship was denied to Israeli Jews by the government of Jordan and only very limited access was granted to Israeli Christians to visit Christian holy sites.[6]

Construction on the synagogue originally began in the early 1700s but the unfinished building was destroyed in an Arab riot in 1721 when the Jewish community which was building the synagogue could not keep up payments for it. In 1978, a memorial arc was erected over the Hurva Synagogue, which remained in place until the reconstruction began in 2005. Funding for the project was provided by the government and a private donor.[7]