Hurva Synagogue

Judah heHasid led roughly 500 followers from Poland to Jerusalem in the winter of 1700, intending to hasten the messianic age by living ascetically in the city. He died a few days after arriving. Those who stayed built about forty dwellings and a small synagogue in the Ashkenazic compound, then began a larger one, and the larger one ruined them: bribes, unforeseen building costs and taxes drained the funds, and the community borrowed from local Arab lenders.

In late 1720, with the debts still outstanding, the lenders lost patience and burned the synagogue and its contents. The consequences went well beyond the building. The community's leaders were imprisoned, and all Ashkenazim, not only heHasid's group, were banished from Jerusalem under an interdiction that held until the statute of limitations on the loans expired about a century later. Shops went up in the courtyard and the plot stayed desolate for 116 years, known simply as the Ruin of Rabbi Judah heHasid.

The Perushim, disciples of the Vilna Gaon, took the site back in stages. Avraham Shlomo Zalman Zoref obtained the long-sought firman on 23 June 1836, with backing from the Austrian and Russian consuls in Alexandria and by invoking the Rothschild name; the Perushim began clearing rubble that September and dedicated the modest Menachem Zion synagogue in the courtyard by January 1837. Zoref did not see the great synagogue built. He was struck on the head with a sword in 1851 and died of the wound three months later.

Permission finally came from Sultan Abdülmecid, and the design and the building work were supervised by Assad Effendi, the sultan's own architect. Baron Alphonse James de Rothschild laid the first stone, eight years before the dedication. Money came in slowly and from a long way off: the largest single gift was 100,000 of the million piasters needed, from Ezekiel Reuben, a Sephardi merchant in Baghdad, whose family eventually covered more than half the cost. Emissaries collected across the diaspora under the slogan "Merit Eternal Life with one stone".

The domed ceiling was closed in 1862, Rabbi Yeshaya Bardaki setting the final stone, and the synagogue was dedicated two years later. Its official name was Beis Yaakov, in memory of James Mayer de Rothschild. Nobody used it. The building was the Hurva then and it is the Hurva now.

It was built in a Byzantine revival manner, four massive pilasters at the corners carrying a large dome, and it was one of the tallest things in the Old City: 16 metres to the base of the dome, 24 metres to the top, with window arches 12.5 metres high in the facade. Twelve windows ringed the base of the dome and a veranda ran round the outside of it, which is where the view has always been. Only one of the four corner towers was ever finished; the other three lacked their upper level and its small capping dome, and photographs from before 1948 show the building that way.

Inside, the prayer hall measured about 15.5 by 14 metres, with the women's galleries carried along three sides and reached through the corner towers. The dome was painted sky blue and scattered with gold, and frescoes of the menorah, Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments covered the walls.

• 16 m to the base of the dome, 24 m to the top
• Prayer hall about 15.5 m by 14 m
• Window arches 12.5 m high in the facade
• Twelve windows round the dome, with a veranda outside them
• Four corner pilasters, of which one tower was completed

The Hurva was the tallest building in the Jewish Quarter, which made it a position as well as a synagogue. On 25 May 1948 Major Abdullah el-Tell, commanding the Arab Legion in the Old City, warned the Red Cross that unless the Haganah withdrew from the synagogue and its courtyard the Legion would attack it. Moshe Russnak, the Haganah commander, did not withdraw; he understood that if the Hurva fell the quarter would follow. An ultimatum on 26 May gave twelve hours.

On 27 May el-Tell told his men to take the Hurva by noon. Fawzi el-Kutub set a 200-litre barrel of explosives against the wall and blew a hole in it; the fighting inside lasted about forty-five minutes. Three Legionnaires were shot by snipers trying to reach the dome to plant a flag and the fourth got it up, which was the signal across the Old City that the quarter was going. The Jewish defenders surrendered the next day.

What happened after the building was taken is where the accounts part. Israeli sources say the Arab Legion then blew up what was left, destroying the 84-year-old synagogue along with the Etz Chaim yeshiva attached to it. Jordanian and Palestinian accounts hold that the synagogue had to be shelled because its high roofs were being used militarily. Both descriptions are of the same rubble, and the difference between them is not a detail: it is the whole argument about who destroyed the Hurva and why.

After 1967 the plot was Israel's to build on and nobody could agree what to build. Many religious and political figures wanted the synagogue back where it was and as it was. The Jewish Quarter Development Company, running the quarter's restoration, opposed that: its planners wanted a building that read as modern, and in any case the architects and masons doubted they had the traditional masonry skill to copy the original, most of whose carved stones and decorative work had been carried off.

So the commission went to Louis Kahn, on Ram Karmi's recommendation, and between 1968 and 1973 Kahn produced three schemes. He proposed a structure inside a structure: sixteen outer piers of golden Jerusalem stone, cut in blocks of the same proportions and finish as those of the Western Wall, enclosing four hollow concrete pillars, with alcoves in the corners for daily prayer. The 1864 ruins were to stay, kept as a memorial garden, with a promenade called the Route of the Prophets running down to the Western Wall. Moshe Safdie backed the approach in blunt terms: it was absurd, he said, to rebuild the Hurva as if nothing had happened.

Teddy Kollek, then mayor, killed it. Learning that Kahn meant to work at a scale comparable to the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall, Kollek asked whether the Jewish Quarter should have a building that competes with the mosque and the Holy Sepulchre, or with the Western Wall. The model went into the Israel Museum and the plan was shelved when Kahn died in 1974. Kent Larson later called it the greatest of the unbuilt, and made a computer reconstruction of it at MIT; the animation work was done at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Charles Clore then funded a second attempt, commissioning Denys Lasdun, whose plans of 1978 to 1981 stayed closer to the original and were still refused, with Menachem Begin and the interior minister declining to sign. In the meantime, in 1977, one of the four stone arches that had carried the old dome was rebuilt on the site as a temporary marker, 16 metres high, two thirds the height of the building it stood for. It lasted until 2006, long enough to become the emblem of the Jewish Quarter in its own right, painted and printed and put on a stamp, before it was taken down to make room for the synagogue.

The Israeli government approved rebuilding in the nineteenth-century style in 2000 and gave the commission to the Jerusalem architect Nahum Meltzer, who had argued for restoring the building in its Ottoman form out of respect both for historical memory and for the built fabric around it. Work began in 2005. The keystone went into the dome on 15 April 2008 and the synagogue was rededicated on 15 March 2010, with a new Torah scroll carried in the day before.

The design is a reconstruction rather than a restoration, but it is not built on nothing. Meltzer's scheme kept the unplastered masonry walls left standing after the 1948 explosion and worked them into the new building, alongside adjustments for modern building code. The operator says the interior follows original architectural drawings found in archives in Istanbul, which is the kind of claim worth attributing rather than repeating flat.

The published cost figures do not agree. English Wikipedia gives a total of 7.3 million dollars, about 28 million shekels, and records that the government contributed 11 million shekels rather than the 85 per cent share the development corporation had sought, with the Ukrainian businessman Vadim Rabinovitch making up the rest. Gil Zohar, reporting for the Jewish Journal at the reopening, put the four-year project at 43 million shekels. Both are in print and this page prints both.

The reopening was political before it was liturgical. Several Palestinian leaders read the rededication as a signal of intent towards the Temple Mount, and the Fatah official Khatem Abd el-Khader called it a provocation. More than 3,000 police were deployed for the ceremony, clashes followed in East Jerusalem the next day, and the Jordanian government, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and Iran's foreign ministry all issued condemnations. Israeli officials answered that the fears rested on rumour.

Nothing could be built until the ground had been dug, and the digging is now part of the visit. Salvage excavation directed by Hillel Geva and Oren Gutfeld found evidence of four main periods of settlement: First Temple, roughly 800 to 600 BCE; Second Temple; Byzantine; and Ottoman. Three ritual baths cut into the bedrock, dated to the first century CE, came out of the work carried out in July and August 2003.

The find that shaped the basement was a Byzantine arch, still standing, 3.7 metres wide, 1.3 metres thick and 5 metres high, beside the remnant of a stone-paved street that branched off the Cardo. It is preserved in place under the synagogue, which is why the operator sells the visit as a lookout and an underground passage rather than as a synagogue tour. The mikveh beneath the paving is older than the street that covered it.

The route is easy to walk past, because the way down is near the toilets rather than off the main hall. It is short, and it is the only part of the building that was not built in this century.