AT A GLANCE

Why go?

The Hurva Synagogue is the great white dome that crowns the skyline of Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter, and its name tells you something about why it has captivated visitors for three centuries. Hurva means the Ruin. A group of five hundred Ashkenazi immigrants from Poland, led by the mystic Judah heHasid, arrived in the winter of 1700 hoping to hasten the coming of the Messiah by building a synagogue on this plot. They ran out of money, borrowed from local lenders, and could not repay. In late 1720 the creditors set the half-finished building alight and the Ashkenazi community was banished from Jerusalem entirely. The plot lay desolate for 116 years and the name stuck through every building since.↗

What stands now is the third iteration: a meticulous reconstruction of the 1864 Ottoman-era synagogue that was itself destroyed by explosives in the 1948 fighting. Rededicated in March 2010 after five years of construction, it is one of the tallest structures in the Old City at 24 meters to the dome's apex. But the real draw for a visitor is not the prayer hall below — it is what you find when you look down into it and when you climb up and out of it. A walkway circles the base of the dome, the highest accessible point in the Jewish Quarter, where the Dome of the Rock, the Mount of Olives, Mount Zion and the Christian Quarter rotate past in a single 360-degree turn. Below ground level, a short passage drops you through two thousand years of stratified history: first-century ritual baths cut into bedrock, a Byzantine arch standing exactly where excavation found it, and a stone-paved street that once ran off the famous Cardo.