Avigayil

The Tunisian Synagogue - Akko, Israel

I was away for most of October (Paris, Israel, poor me) and I just finished the very lengthy process of editing the photos. Delete, delete, delete. I always pop up to Akko when I go to Israel (if “pop” is the right word, which it isn’t, because Akko is way up north, not that the country is so big that “up north” is so far away, but still) to visit my family there. “Tzvi me-Akko”—Tzvi from Akko—is how the patriarch of that branch of the family identifies himself when he calls, which he does every month or so to find out if I’m getting married yet. He’s a character, Tzvi me-Akko. An incredible man. He’s my grandfather’s nephew and therefore my father’s first cousin, but my grandfather was the youngest of 12 and Tzvi is more than 15 years older than my father and he seems more like my grandfather’s peer than my father’s. Like my grandfather, he was born in a Hasidic shtetl in a region that has changed hands many times over the past 100 years but is now part of Ukraine. He lost most of his family in the Holocaust and, a teenager during those years, he passed through several labor camps himself. After the war, he returned to the area he was from and promptly got stuck behind the Iron Curtain until the 1970s, when he was able to get out and join his daughter in Israel. They didn’t pick Akko; it was picked for them.

I usually dread the obligatory trip to Akko because I’d rather be hanging out with my friends in Jerusalem, but this time was different, for no apparent reason. It wasn’t the feast at the excellent Shippudei Sammy Ha-Gadol and it wasn’t the late-afternoon stroll through the Old City. It wasn’t the lovely but new-to-me cousin who shlepped all the way up from Be’er Sheva just to meet me and it wasn’t another cousin’s jolly husband, whose nonstop joke-cracking is the perfect counterpoint to the Soviet dourness of some of the other relatives. And I don’t think it was the Tunisian Synagogue, AKA Ohr Torah, even though it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in my life. The floors, ceilings, and walls of the shul are covered—COVERED—in mosaics depicting verses and stories from the Bible, maps of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, coins of Israel through the years, and more and more and more. Imagine the Watts Towers but Jewish. It’s sort of like that. Sort of. OK, not really but that’s the first thing that popped into my mind.

The photos I took are inadequate and words are too, so I’m stopping here. You just have to see it for yourself. It was a shame that I had a train to catch and only 15 minutes to spare; it was a tragedy that I couldn’t stay for the wedding. Yes, there was a wedding there that evening and this being Israel, a place where things like this happen all the time, we were invited to stay and when we declined, they insisted.