The Jewish Quarter

This guide to the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City follows the Hurva Synagogue, whose name means the ruin and stuck for over a century. It traces the Ashkenazi community led by Rabbi Yehuda HeHasid, who arrived in 1700 hoping to greet the Messiah, the debts that followed their leader's sudden death, and the creditors who set the unfinished building ablaze twenty years later. The synagogue rose again as Jerusalem's grandest in 1864, funded by a new congregation determined to finish what the first one couldn't.