january 2007
shariat alyehud -- jew street -- in old city. it's a pretty poor neighborhood. ironically, many displaced palestinians own most of the property here, and hezbollah flags and arafat posters populate the windows.
a hungry alley cat.
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you would never guess it, but at the end of this alley leads to damascus's last active synagogue. i learned about it from one of the palestinian residents in the jewish quarter.
this is the door. it stays locked all week. it opens on saturdays from 10-12.
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inside the door is an opening to another world and another time. a traditional sfardic synagogue has the pulpit in the middle. they get a minion on high holy days, but the seven that showed up on this saturday weren't really able to fill the space -- it looked as empty as the picture. especially without a rabbi.
the ark -- there are six torahs inside. at the end of the service, we opened it up, each congregant touched the scrolls, as a congregant on the pulpit said a closer prayer.
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the pulpit, where we read torah; congregants in the background.
right to left: in the clothes businness; in the shoe business; in the clothes businness.
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notice the wooden ceiling, painted teal.
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a library of hebrew books.
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in these cases you can see more torahs. those blue chairs were where i sat during the services.
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afterwards i went to the presidents house for tea. hanging on his wall he had golden plates that read ALLAH in arabic too. next to the one that read ALLAH was this golden plate: shalom. to the right of this plate is a menorah.
people familiar with the basic history of islam know that muhammad was exiled from mecca to yethrb. as the story goes, when the people of yethrub heard the qur'an, they began to believe in god; they renamed yethrub "the menowrah city" -- the city of light. it's shorthand name is "city," which in arabic is: "medina."
more things on the president's wall.
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the president and his sister. if you look in the left hand corner of this picture, you'll actually notice a muslim prayer calandar. [that doesn't mean he wants to know when to make his five prayers a day... actually they give these things out for free on the street:)] i had a pretty interesting discussion with him, on politics and religion, which i'd be happy to talk to anyone about in realtime. he also told me how to get cheap airplane tickets to brooklyn. some things don't change :)
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