Szegő Dóra - Szegő György: Synagogues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2004)
Two major turns in the history of the Jews modified the function of the Temple.The focus of Jewish cultic life was destroyed by the Babylonian hosts in 587 B.C., and then the rebuilt Temple was razed to the ground by the Roman legions of Titus in 70 A.D. After the destruction of its cultic centre, the Jewish people remade its sacral spaces by reorienting its liturgical activities and everyday life, focusing the spatial arrangement of its sacral places on the sanctity of the Torah scroll, that "portable homeland" (H. Heine). With that the synagogue becomes the locus of assemblage where simplified and more intimate cultic practices, now lacking the rite of sacrifice, incorporate the reading and exegesis of the Holy Writ. The synagogue is thus not necessarily a hallowed space, but a meeting place of the congregation, joined functionally as well as structurally to the spaces of learning in the study house (bet ha-midradh). In György Gábor’s words, "the intimacy of the space accentuated the more familiar aspects of worshipping God, the fact that the individual members of a given Jewish community met on the occasion of a Sabbath or the High Holidays, which is how this particular location, now the terrain of studying, too, could function as an anteroom to the observance of the holiday and the remembrance to be continued and completed at home in the family circle." A people deprived of its homeland, the Jewish community relies on the synagogue—a location replacing the cultic temple with the confined and intimate space of communal prayer and teaching—for its long-term survival." [...] The spiritual, or heavenly Temple, existing from the beginning of time and made by immortal hands, awaits the coming of the Messiah to stand in its former place and proclaim—as a timeless symbol of a higher spirituality and harmony wherein the wolf and the lamb lie down together—the peace which will have no end," says the religious historian. The church concept of Western Civilization derives from the Temple of Jerusalem. It reached the West in the shape of an objectified Heavenly Temple via the mediation of the hallowed Hebrew Bible, that "portable homeland". The Crusaders were unable either to keep or to transport the Temple of Jerusalem, in its entire earthly physicality, to the West. Similarly to the temple-concept of the Jewish diaspora, Christianity, too, created its own idea of a sacred "Heavenly Jerusalem". After the golden age of Moorish-Jewish coexistence in the Middle Ages, the Sephardi population of the Iberian peninsula fled to the West. Their flight continued for centuries. According to expert sources, these refugees met in mediaeval Poland and Hungary with groups that had arrived there earlier from Jerusalem. In any case, it is a fact that the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews of Europe liberated in the 19th century from their ghetto-existence created, in a complex field of cultic and 7
