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Ben Ezer's Temple
Ben Ezer's Temple, Cairo, Egypt Not AvailableAbout
Egypt Home of Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Philo of Alexandria, Jeremiah the prophet, Moses ben Maimon, the gaon Saadia and others, Seeing the sights the oldest known synagogue and the second oldest Jewish cemetery in the world. Ben Ezer's Temple, lying at the end point of church buildings , is reported to have been erected in the 6th or presumably the 9th Century AD. The temple site and the surrounding grounds, originally a property of the church, was acquired by the Jews in return for "kantars of gold". The basilica-style temple contains a Jewish heritage library, that was inaugurated on November 25,1997. At the back of the temple, there is a very deep well, where the coffers in which Prophet Moses as an infant was placed by his mother, was reportedly found. The oldest existing synagogue is Ben Ezra. Restoration work there has just been completed by the SCA and the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Restoration. The CCAR restored the synagogue itself, a task which took from 1982 until 1991. Now, the project's main aim has been to restore a marble slab in the middle of the synagogue. On it are inscribed the names of benefactors, and the sentence "Moses worshipped God here". Last year, a library was established near the synagogue, containing about 3,000 rare manuscripts in Hebrew, collected from other synagogues and the Jewish schools. The oldest dates back to 1717, and is an exegesis of the Torah. Ben Ezra Synagogue was originally a church, built in the sixth century near the Roman Fortress of Babylon in Old Cairo. In the ninth century Jews bought the church and a large piece of land surrounding it. For the Jews, the synagogue has great historical, spiritual and religious importance: it is also supposed to be the first place where Moses prayed. Until today, it is a frequently visited pilgrimage site. The synagogue also acquired world fame when a vast number of Geniza Documents were discovered there. The Ben Ezra Geniza was discovered in 1890, when the ceiling of the storeroom collapsed. Thereafter, many documents were stolen from their hiding place. In 1892, Jacob Saphir, a Jewish researcher, took several thousand documents away, and wrote a description of the storeroom, besides giving an idea of its contents. In 1894, documents dating back to the 11th and 12th centuries were removed. Today, the Taylor-Schechter Collection of the Cambridge University Library contains most of the rest: some 140,000 rare manuscripts and books and half a million other documents. According to Serag, the mutual architectural influence of Jews, Muslims and Christians appears clearly in the Ben Ezra Synagogue. Christian influence shows in the building style itself, which is reminiscent of a basilica.
