Joseph Avis was a Quaker carpenter, joiner, and merchant tailor in the City of London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He worked under the architects Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke on reconstruction projects in London following the Great Fire of 1666, including several churches, but is best known as the architect of the Bevis Marks Synagogue.
And now Blimele, dear child,
Stop—stop playing now.
No time for that.
We can be called at any minute
To leave our poor home
—A lonely boat on an island of sand—
And be hurled into the midst
Of a…
During his life, Samuel Abbas amassed an impressive library that included 1,136 books in different languages—Latin (more than four hundred works), Hebrew, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, and…
This Torah mantle, from about 1655, is embroidered with silk and gilt-silver thread and is richly decorated with curling, interlocking patterns. The crown dates from the middle of the nineteenth…