Hurva Square

A parking lot once occupied the site where the square’s slabs now lie and the tall dome rises. The Ashkenazi Courtyard once stood here: houses, a study hall, and a synagogue for people who had come to Jerusalem from European lands. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the ruins were replaced by a large domed building, later destroyed in the fighting; the vacant site was again left without a house of worship. The present synagogue repeats its appearance and is once again operating in the quarter.

The stone square beside the tall dome remains the main meeting place in the Jewish Quarter. At the synagogue, people pray, read the Torah, and hold bar mitzvahs—ceremonies marking religious adulthood. The name for all of this is strange: “Hurva” means “ruin” in Hebrew.

The name appeared after a migration that was meant to bring redemption closer but ended with the disappearance of an entire community. In seventeen hundred, the preacher Judah he-Hasid brought several hundred followers here from Eastern Europe. He persuaded them to leave their former lives and settle in Jerusalem. The Ashkenazi Courtyard already stood here—a residential complex for Jews of European origin, with houses, a study hall, and a synagogue. The local community was restoring the synagogue with borrowed money.

Five days after arriving, Judah he-Hasid died. The settlers were left without the man who raised funds for them and held such a large group together. They needed housing and food; after epidemics, their situation became even harder. They lived on donations from Europe, and when the money fell short, they borrowed from local Arab moneylenders at high interest.

For twenty years, the community’s emissaries raised funds in European cities and tried to negotiate payments. The debt kept growing anyway. In seventeen twenty, the creditors entered the courtyard, burned the synagogue, and put the community leaders under arrest. Most Ashkenazim fled Jerusalem; the few who remained joined the Sephardic community, where they prayed according to a different rite. After that, the city had no organized Ashkenazi community for about one hundred years.

The ruined courtyard was named Hurvat Rabbi Judah he-Hasid—“the ruin of Rabbi Judah he-Hasid.” He himself did not build the synagogue that the creditors destroyed: its restoration had begun before he arrived. His name became attached to the ruins because the group he brought inherited the debts, lost the courtyard, and was forced to leave the city.

The debt outlived the borrowers. Descendants of the creditors continued presenting old promissory notes to new Ashkenazim, considering them successors to the former community. Some Jews of European origin remained in Jerusalem, passing themselves off as Sephardim through their clothing and customs. When Menachem Mendel of Shklov, leader of the followers of the Vilna Gaon, came here in eighteen sixteen to restore the Ashkenazi community, his companions also had to conceal their origins. They sought the cancellation of the old claims, paid a substantial part of the debts, and petitioned for decades for permission to regain the courtyard.

In eighteen sixty-four, a large domed synagogue was consecrated on the site of the fire. It was officially named Beit Yaakov Synagogue, but residents continued to call it “Hurva.” In nineteen forty-eight, the Jordanian Arab Legion blew up the building during the fighting for the Jewish Quarter. The vacant site later became a parking lot, and in nineteen eighty-three a square was laid out here.

The dome in front of the square belongs to an exact reconstruction of the nineteenth-century synagogue, opened in twenty ten. The building is once again whole and operating, but both it and the square still bear the name left after the fire of seventeen twenty: Hurva, “ruin.”