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(JTA) – While hundreds of Israel protesters on campuses across the country came to blows and arrests continued to mount this week, students in Providence, Rhode Island, faced a calmer reality on Wednesday. The only consistently operating Jewish house of worship in Chicago’s Loop, the 1.5-square-mile area touted as the second largest business district in North America, the Loop Synagogue has been unusual since it was conceived in 1929. Before the pandemic, most popped in for lunch or a prayer service during the workday while spending Shabbat at their home synagogues in the suburbs. In recognition of that unusual arrangement, dues top out at $180 — meaning that the congregation’s 400 members generate far too little revenue to keep operations afloat. Modern Jews, on the other hand, reject the idea of rebuilding the Temple and resuming sacrifices.
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Our hearts are with all the victims, survivors, families, and friends whose loved ones were killed, wounded, displaced, or taken hostage — including women and girls whom Hamas has subjected to appalling acts of rape and sexual violence. The rabbis were a fairly small group, so it is not surprising that archaeological evidence for study houses is slim. The discovery of a lintel with the inscription "This is the study house of Rabbi Elazar haKappar" is a fortunate find; as of now this appears to be the only rabbi mentioned in rabbinic literature who is also mentioned in an archaeological inscription. The ark (aron kodesh in Hebrew) is the central feature of the sanctuary. Contained within the ark will be the congregation's Torah scroll(s). Above the ark is the Ner Tamid (Hebrew for "Eternal Flame"), which is a light that remains lit constantly, even when the sanctuary is not in use.
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And last week, when MAGA activist and worship leader Sean Feucht stood at the gates of Columbia University to oppose pro-Palestinian protesters and to demand that the school’s president resign, “How Great Is Our God” was on his lips. The university rejected a separate demand from the students that it not prosecute the students arrested for protesting on campus in recent months. Some of those who attended services regularly before COVID-19 are being vaccinated and looking forward to returning to their luminous prayer space once the pandemic is under control.
Synagogue as community center
Synagogues are consecrated spaces used for Jewish prayer, study, assembly, and reading of the Torah (read in its entirety once a year, or in some synagogues on a triennial cycle, in weekly Torah portions during religious services). However, a synagogue is not always necessary for Jewish worship, due to adaptations during times of Jewish persecution in countries and regions that banned Judaism, frequently destroying and/or reappropriating synagogues into churches or even government buildings. Halakha (Jewish law from the Mishnah – the "Oral Torah") states that communal Jewish worship can be carried out wherever a minyan, a group of at least 10 Jewish adults, is assembled, often (but not necessarily) led by a rabbi. Worship can also happen alone or with fewer than ten people, but certain prayers are considered by halakha as solely communal; these can be recited only by a minyan.
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And many Jews agree with Maimonides that sacrifices are no longer the best way to worship God. Early leaders in the Reform movement even named their houses of worship temples to signify they had abandoned the traditional Jewish longing to rebuild the Temple. Since it was destroyed for the second time in 70 CE, Jews have not been able to worship at the Temple. But elements of the Temple ritual are brought into Jewish practice, including in the architecture of the synagogue.
They are no longer suitable for ritual use, pages damaged and ink smeared, not kosher to be read from during religious services. But they have found homes with synagogues and other Jewish organizations around the world. They are usually kept in a visible space, under glass to protect them, often unrolled a bit so that a panel of text is visible. They are a memorial, a memory of what we lost and what still survives despite all efforts to blot it out. It is the place where Jews come together for community prayer services. The sanctity of the synagogue for this purpose is second only to The Temple.
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By the fourth century, synagogue inscriptions at Hammat Tiberias refer to the synagogue as "a holy place." While the Diaspora term proseuche implies that the synagogue was a place for prayer, the primary activity in the Theodotos synagogue was the recitation and study of the Torah. It usually contains an English translation of the Torah, as well as the Hebrew and English text of the Haftarot read after the weekly Torah portion. Congregants use the chumash to follow along with the Torah and Haftarah readings during the prayer service.
Supporters of Israel erected a screen that played a video loop of scenes from the Hamas Oct. 7 attack. The two sides taunted one another, pushed, shoved and threw punches while campus police struggled to contain the skirmishes. It has about 32,000 undergraduate students and is located in the residential neighborhood of Westwood just outside of Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. Footage from the early hours showed mostly male counter-demonstrators, many of them masked and some apparently older than students, throwing objects and trying to smash or pull down the wooden and steel barriers erected to shield the encampment. The Los Angeles Police Department said on X it was responding to UCLA's request "due to multiple acts of violence within the large encampment on their campus," to restore order and maintain public safety.
Meanwhile, new options are emerging to serve younger Jews who are moving to the West Loop, an adjacent and up-and-coming neighborhood. There's an 85-year-old building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles that has been a venue for the Dalai Lama, the LA Philharmonic and even scenes in Entourage and The West Wing. But extracurricular activities aside, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple is a house of worship. Recently refurbished, and given a preservation award by the Los Angeles Conservancy, the temple has a special place in the history of Hollywood. Some rabbis encouraged their colleagues and students to pray in the synagogue. The mid-third century Rabbi Yohanan stated that one must pray in a place designated for prayer, and a second tradition even more specifically obligates a person to have a designated place in the synagogue.
Last weekend, hundreds of counter-protesters had turned up there chanting support for Israel, hoisting signs and waving blue-and-white Israeli flags. Fifteen people were injured during the UCLA confrontation, including one person who was hospitalized, according to Michael V. Drake, the president of the University of California system. The COVID-19 pandemic amped up that polarization, said Taylor, with Feucht and other activists turning worship into a partisan act during pandemic-era lockdowns. Feucht began holding outdoor impromptu worship rallies in places such as Portland and Seattle, near the sites of protests that followed the death of George Floyd.
The ark of the synagogue, which houses the Torah scrolls, mirrors both the Ark of the Covenant that held the original Ten Commandments and also the Holy of Holies, the chamber where it was stored — which was also screened by a curtain. The ner tamid, or eternal light, that hangs above the ark recalls the fire of the altar. And in synagogues where men and women sit separately, the women’s section is called the ezrat nashim, the courtyard of the women, as was the area of the Temple permitted to women. According to rabbinic evidence, some of these study houses were, like the ancient synagogues, monumental buildings.
The Torah Ark, called in Hebrew ארון קודש Aron Kodesh or 'holy chest', and alternatively called the heikhal—היכל or 'temple' by Sephardic Jews, is a cabinet in which the Torah scrolls are kept. "We refuse to let our traditions be used to starve, displace, and massacre Palestinians," the Jewish Voice for Peace said in a tweet during the protest. "Taking seriously the mandate of the Jewish holiday of liberation requires us to show up with everything we have on the doorsteps of those still arming and funding these historic atrocities." By nightfall, demonstrators sat in the street and led protest chants against Israel and U.S. foreign aid to the country. Police began pulling dozens of people, young and old, off the roadway. Officers handcuffed them with zip ties and loaded them on several buses that lined the street.
The Temple definitely stood on the Temple Mount — that has always been an agreed fact and has been confirmed by archaeologists. Some believe that it was in the exact location of the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine (highly recognizable on the Jerusalem skyline) which houses the foundation stone. Another view agrees with a statement in the Talmud (Berakhot 54a) which says it was aligned with the Eastern Gate, which would place it slightly north of the Dome of the Rock. There is also a theory that it was situated slightly east of the Dome of the Rock. The construction of the Temple is described in great detail in the Hebrew Bible, and its practices are meticulously documented and parsed in the Talmud.
Jewish leaders said that Brown remains a safe and thriving place for Jewish students today. And, Bolton hopes, actually putting divestment to a vote could help quell the unrest on campus by demonstrating that there is not as much popular support for the idea as protesters think. The new agreement was signed by members of the Brown Divestment Coalition — including leaders of Jews For Ceasefire Now, a pro-Palestinian campus group that saw 20 of its members arrested. “While we acknowledge that this is by no means a total victory, we celebrate this step in the fight for divestment, and further, Palestinian liberation,” the Jewish group, which did not reply to a JTA request for comment, wrote on Instagram Wednesday.
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