Ari Synagogue
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The Ari Synagogue is situated on Ohr ha-Chaim Street in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. It is located on the ground floor of a building which also houses the Ohr ha-Chaim Synagogue and Old Yishuv Court Museum. It is named after Rabbi Isaac Luria, (1534-1572), who was known as the Ari (Hebrew: אֲרִי; trans: The Lion), an acronym for Adoneinu Rabbeinu Itzhak (our master, our rabbi, Isaac). He was a great kabbalist who founded a new school in Kabbalistic thought, known as the "System of the Ari" or "Lurianic kabbalah".
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[edit] Origins
According to tradition, it was in this building where Rabbi Isaac Luria was born and where he lived for 20 years. It is told that Eliyahu Ha-Navi was the sandek at his Brit milah. At some stage, the room of his traditional birthplace became a Sephardic synagogue. The Jews of the yishuv were forbidden by Ottoman Law to establish any new synagogues. This led to inconspicuous prayer houses which, like the Ari Synagogue, were located in residential homes. During the riots of 1936 the synagogue was looted and burned.
[edit] Old Yishuv Court Museum
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With the establishment of the Museum in 1976, the synagogue became part of the exhibit, and was restored according to the Sephardic tradition. In addition to the Holy Ark of the Torah, the reader's platform and the benches, there are Torah scroll coverings on display, and scribe's tools for writing the sacred and Jewish ceremonial texts.On the walls are posters from various time periods showing the conditions under which the Jewish Community lived.The exhibit shows the relations between Jewish residents and local government, from the days of Sultan Abdul Hamid Khan through the period of Mehmet 5, to thle time of England's Queen Victoria, King George 5, and High Commissioner for Palestine Herbert Samuel.
Now, there (st. Or Chaim ,6) situated The Isaac Kaplan "Old Yishuv Court Museum"
The Isaac Kaplan Old Yishuv Court Museum is located in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, “between the walls.” The building apparently dates from the 15th or 16th century, and all signs point to it having been built over the ruins of a previous, more ancient structure. We regret that archaeologists have never excavated the site, nor has there been any research study of the building.The entryway is very narrow and dark, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling. One door leads out to the inner courtyard, the second to an additional yard, and the third leads into a typical room where one family used to live. Opposite the entranceway is a stairwell to the upper floor. As soon as one enters the building, it is possible to feel a mysterious sense of encounter with a different universe.
The term old yishuv refers to the Jewish community that lived here for centuries, long before the arrival of the first Zionists in the 1880s. The court is the inner courtyard around which compounds — usually shared by several families - were built. Two small synagogues, dating to the 16th and 18th centuries, occupy part of the compound. The Shaar HaShamayim kabbalistic yeshiva was housed here for a time.
The museum, which opened in 1976 and contains more than 6,500 artifacts, highlights the Ginio family — Sephardi vintners who fled Spain after the Expulsion of 1492, settled in Salonika in the Ottoman Empire (today Thessalonica, Greece) and ultimately immigrated to Jerusalem.
The museum was created by Rivca Weingarten, daughter of Rabbi Mordechai Weingarten, the mukhtar (community head) of the pre-State Jewish Quarter.She returned to dwell in her family's house after the Six-Day-War (they lived in the building from 1812 until 1948) and opened the museum to preserve a record of the lifestyle of the Old Yishuv. The current curator of the museum is Galia Gavish who runs the exhibit under the auspices of the Jerusalem Foundation and the Ministry of Culture. Like Tehilla's room in S.Y. Agnon's tale, Jerusalem of long ago comes alive again in The Old Yishuv Court Museum - the story of the Jewish community in Palestine from the period under Ottoman rule through the final days of the British Mamdate.
Thousands of artifacts on exhibit in the Museum tell the story of the residents of the Jewish Quarter, from the nineteenth century through the fall of the Jewish Quarter to the Jordanians in 1948. This is the story of a vibrant and creative life under extreme material poverty, in a city under foreign rule.
The museum itself was the home of the Weingarten family for five generations, until 1948, when the Jewish Quarter fell to the Arabs. In 1967, Rivkah Weingarten, now the museum's director, returned to her old home and began to collect furniture, china, clothing and many other items to re-create a picture of daily life here in the 18th and 19th centuries. The rooms in this old house have stone walls that are over three feet thick, and high, domed ceilings. One room is furnished in the Ashkenazi — central or eastern European —manner, another is Sephardi — Spanish. The collection of kitchen utensils reminds one of how difficult life must have been when bread was still baked at home in primitive ovens, and when irons were heated by burning coals inserted under their lids. There is also an interesting assemblage of tools used by tradesmen or professionals, from shoemakers and tinsmiths to dentists and physicians. And in the courtyard, the only water supply to the inhabitants: a cistern in which rainwater was collected during the winter. A few flowerpots in a corner, and a laundry line with old-fashioned bloomers flapping in the breeze help evoke the feeling of a bygone way of life.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century most of the residents were of Sephardic ethnic origin. In the room of this period, we have a restored room according to the customs of the East: seating was on or near the floor in cross-legged position, with few pieces of furniture. Storage was in wooden chests the sanduk .
