Shabazi Synagogue

The story

The Shabazi synagogue stands in Shabazi Lane in Neighborhood Alef, and it is one of the two synagogues in Beersheba that are listed in the register of the Religious Council in the Yemenite rite. The name is not that of the street alone: Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, who lived in Yemen in the seventeenth century, is the greatest of the poets of Yemenite Jewry, and his poetry is sung to this day — so that the lane and the synagogue together carry the name that marks this community in every place to which it came. The second of the two, “Ezrat Ahim Baladi”, stands on Ha-Shomer Street and its name states the Baladi rite — one of the two rites between which Yemenite Jewry is divided, alongside the Shami. That is, the internal division of the community too is kept here, in two houses and in two names. The synagogue stands about one hundred and twenty meters from the central synagogue for the Jews of Iraq — two communities that came to the city in the same years, each with a rite of its own, within walking distance of each other.

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• Beersheba