The Wexner Foundation, one of the premier American foundation’s promoting Jewish culture, featured Diarna in the December 3 edition of their newsletter. “Returning to ‘Our Homes,’” written by Diarna coordinator Jason Guberman-Pfeffer, provides an overview of some of the more interesting sites and stories that Diarna has documented in the past year. Here are a few excerpts:

…Regardless of chance of birth, Jews have a shared heritage, grown of a common soil in the Middle East. Shiraz, Constantine, Taiz, or any of a hundred cities and over a thousand towns and villages across the region, were the milieus of Biblical prophets, medieval philosophers, travelers and traders. The foundational ideas of Jewish civilization that they forged and which to this day are associated with specific places, retain their universal relevance.

Some sites that shaped Jewish identity are fairly well known.  The ‘Great Synagogue’ in Aleppo, Syria, for centuries housed the eponymous Codex. While the Synagogue was pillaged during riots in 1947, significant parts of the Codex escaped destruction and are now stored in the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book beneath the Dead Sea Scrolls. The ramshackle physical state of the Maimonides Synagogue in Cairo’s Harat el-Yahud (Old Jewish Quarter) conceals an illustrious past, as the place where its namesake purportedly prayed, taught, and wrote the Mishneh Torah and Moreh Nevukhim (Guide of the Perplexed). According to various accounts, Maimonides was initially buried in the Synagogue’s catacomb, which through the 1960s was visited by Jews and Muslims alike seeking healing from ailments.

Legend also shrouds the origins of traditional shrines of Biblical figures, including the tombs of Ezekiel (in al-Kifl, Iraq), Nahum (in al-Qosh, a village in Iraqi-Kurdistan), and Zevulon (in Sidon, Lebanon). In the 1970s, Iranian Jews remodeled the small shrine believed to contain the tombs of Esther and Mordechai, located just outside what is now Imam Khomeini Square in downtown Hamadan. The architect refurbished the structure and built alongside it a subterranean chapel with a skylight in the shape of a Magen David. This symbol can be seen in Google Earth, quite possibly making Iran home to the only Jewish Star visible from space.

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