Image Details

Beth Hatefutsoth

Now destroyed, the Mustaribah Synagogue, in Aleppo, Syria, is preserved in this model in the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv. Even in miniature, the model suggests the lost grandeur of the 2,500-year-old Jewish community in Syria. This portion of the model shows the outdoor, summertime bimah, the raised platform on which the Bible was read—one of three within the synagogue.

The synagogue and its priceless treasure, the treasure, the tenth-century biblical manuscript known as the Aleppo Codex, fell victim in 1947 to rioters enraged by the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Though the Codex was feared to have been totally lost, three quarters survived the synagogue’s destruction and was eventually smuggled to Israel.