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Palm imagery is a common motif in decorative architectural elements like window balustrades. Each of the four columns in this partial restoration from the biblical period is six inches in diameter and…
The battle between a wild bull and a lion, which are among the most powerful animals, is a common theme in ancient Near Eastern art. In this panel from Samaria, the lion’s claws are embedded in the…
Sphinxes are among the most ubiquitous images on Iron Age Levantine ivories. The sphinx combines the features of several animals; it has the head of a human, the wings of an eagle, and the body of a…
Built in 1568, the Paradesi Synagogue is the oldest synagogue in India, as well as in the entire British Commonwealth. The land on which it was built was a gift from the Rajah of Cochin, Paraja, so…
Home to a Jewish community from at least the thirteenth century, Pesaro later became the refuge of Portuguese and Spanish Jews in the sixteenth century. In 1642, a few years after the town’s Jews were…
Built in the seventeenth century, the Scuola Greca is a synagogue located in the area of the ghetto in which Jews were confined in 1622, in a neighborhood still known as “Evraiki” (Jews). It is the…
There were once hundreds of wooden synagogues in Poland and Lithuania, but only a very few examples of this particularly Jewish form of architecture have survived. The Zabłudów synagogue, built around…
Joseph Avis, a Quaker carpenter, was commissioned to build the first synagogue in England following the readmission of Jews in 1656: the synagogue of London’s Spanish and Portuguese community, on…
The Yeshivat Dijet Synagogue was located in the Hara Seghira (the “small ghetto”) neighborhood of Djerba, Tunisia. It was one of several synagogues in this area, which, along with Hara Kebira, were…
Built in 1736, the Tzedek ve-Shalom synagogue served a Sephardic congregation of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had migrated from Holland to Suriname. Located in Suriname’s capital of Paramaribo, the…
