Jewish architecture comprises the architecture of Jewish religious buildings and other buildings that either incorporate Jewish elements in their design or are used by Jewish communities.
Due to the diasporic nature of Jewish history, there is no single architectural style that is common across all Jewish cultures. [1] Examples of buildings considered Jewish architecture include explicitly religious buildings such as synagogues and mikvehs, [2] as well as Jewish schools. [3]
The Dura-Europos synagogue was an ancient synagogue uncovered at Dura-Europos, Syria, in 1932. The synagogue contains a forecourt and house of assembly with painted walls depicting people and animals, and a Torah shrine in the western wall facing Jerusalem. It was built backing on to the city wall, which was important in its survival. The last phase of construction was dated by an Aramaic inscription to 244 CE, making it one of the oldest synagogues in the world. It was unique among the many ancient synagogues that have emerged from archaeological excavations as the structure was preserved virtually intact, and it had extensive figurative wall-paintings, which came as a considerable surprise to scholars. These paintings are now displayed in the National Museum of Damascus.
Jewish Cubans, Cuban Jews, or Cubans of Jewish heritage, have lived in the nation of Cuba for centuries. Some Cubans trace Jewish ancestry to Marranos who came as colonists, though few of these practice Judaism today. The majority of Cuban Jews are descended from European Jews who immigrated in the early 20th century. More than 24,000 Jews lived in Cuba in 1924, and still more immigrated to the country in the 1930s. Following the 1959 communist revolution, 94% of the country's Jews emigrated, most of them to the United States. In 2007 an estimated 1,500 known Jewish Cubans remained in the country, overwhelmingly located in Havana. Several hundred have since immigrated to Israel.
Congregation Mikveh Israel, "Holy Community Hope of Israel", is a synagogue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that traces its history to 1740. Mikveh Israel is a Spanish and Portuguese synagogue that follows the rite of the Amsterdam esnoga. It is the oldest synagogue in Philadelphia, and the longest running in the United States.
The United Religious Front was a political alliance of the four major religious parties in Israel, as well as the Union of Religious Independents, formed to fight in the 1949 elections.
Sabato Morais was an Italian-American rabbi of Portuguese descent, leader of Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia, pioneer of Italian Jewish Studies in America, and founder of the Jewish Theological Seminary, which initially acted as a center of education for Orthodox Rabbis.
The Etz Hayyim Synagogue is an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Chania on the Greek island of Crete. It is the only surviving remnant of the island's Romaniote Jewish community.
The Peki’in Synagogue, is a synagogue located in the centre of Peki'in, Northern Israel. The current building was erected in 1873, on the site of older ones. Local tradition holds that it has two stones taken from the walls of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem built into its walls.
Jeffrey S. Gurock is Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University in New York City.
The Alte Synagoge in Erfurt, Germany, is one of the best preserved medieval synagogues in Europe, its oldest parts dating back to the late 11th century. Most parts of the building date from around 1250–1320. It is thought to be the oldest synagogue building intact to its roof still standing in Europe and the world.
In Judaism, especially in Orthodox Judaism, there are a number of settings in which men and women are kept separate in order to conform with various elements of halakha and to prevent men and women from mingling. Other streams of Judaism rarely separate genders any more than secular western society.
Edinburgh Synagogue was opened in 1932 and is located on Salisbury Road in the Newington area of Edinburgh. It is the home of the Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation (EHC) which was founded in 1816. Prior to the opening of the 1932 building, the congregation worshipped at a converted chapel on Graham Street which had served as its synagogue since 1898.
The Jewish quarter of Toledo is a district of the city of Toledo, in Castile-La Mancha, Spain. It was the neighborhood in which the Jews lived in the Middle Ages, although they were not obliged to live within it.
The New Synagogue of Mainz is in use since 2010 as a community center at the location of the former main synagogue on the Hindenburgstraße of Mainz Neustadt. Due to controversial discussions regarding the street name, the location in the Hindenburgstraße was renamed as Synagogenplatz.
Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and the director of NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. In 1998, she founded the Sexual Cultures book series at NYU Press with José Muñoz; she now co-edits the series with Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o. Her book You Can Tell Just By Looking, co-authored with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico, was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Non-Fiction.
Holocaust and Memory, originally published in 1996 in Polish and translated into English in 2001, is a book by Barbara Engelking and edited by Gunnar S. Paulsson. Engelking analyzes a series of Jewish survivors living in Poland to explore how their life under the Nazis impacted them. It was published in English by Leicester University Press.
Pamela S. Nadell is an American historian, researcher, author, and lecturer focusing on Jewish history. Former President of the Association for Jewish Studies, she currently holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women's and Gender history at American University. Nadell has focused her research on Jewish women and their role within Jewish history as well as in shaping the history of the United States through their role in various social and political movements.
Lynn Rita Davidman is an American sociologist. She is the distinguished professor of modern Jewish studies and professor of sociology at the University of Kansas.
Jews and the American Slave Trade is a 1998 book by American historian Saul S. Friedman published by the Transaction Publishers. It focuses on the Jewish involvement in the American slave trade and is a polemical rebuttal against the 1991 work The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. It has also been described as contributing to the contemporary debates related to African American–Jewish relations.
FDR and the Jews is a 2013 book by Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman examining the complex relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews.
The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War is a 2012 book by Halik Kochanski about the Polish contribution to World War II and published by Harvard University Press.