1835 – The Journey of the Gaza Synagogue Doors from Ruin to Refuge in Hebron

JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

1835
The Journey of the Gaza Synagogue Doors:
From Ruin to Refuge in Hebron

In 1835, amid regional turmoil, the last Jewish residents of Gaza rescued the carved wooden doors of their abandoned synagogue before it was demolished. They brought the doors to Hebron, installing them in the historic Avraham Avinu Synagogue—symbolically linking the two ancient communities. For nearly a century, the doors stood as a testament to Gaza’s lost Jewish heritage until they were destroyed during the 1929 Hebron massacre. Their story reflects both the endurance and fragility of Jewish life in the Land of Israel.

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After having reached great prominence in the 17th century, by the late 18th century, Gaza had a small but active Jewish community.

In early 1799, Napoleon led his army in the conquest of the coastal towns of Palestine. When he captured Gaza, he found that most of the Jews, fearing the worst, had fled to Hebron before his arrival. The remaining Jews abandoned the city when they discovered that Napoleon had failed to restrain the French soldiers and local Arabs from abusing the few Jewish residents that had remained in Gaza. Their flight marked the temporary end of a Jewish presence in the area. By 1811, virtually no Jews remained in Gaza, and its main synagogue lay abandoned.

Meanwhile, Hebron had a continuous Jewish presence and a historic synagogue named Avraham Avinu (Our Father Abraham) built in 1540. Hebron’s Jewish community welcomed the refugees from Gaza, who, in turn, maintained ties to their former hometown and kept alive the memory of Gaza’s synagogue.

In 1835, a turning point came when, during the war between the Ottoman Empire and the rebellious province of Egypt, Ibrahim Pasha, the Egyptian ruler governing the region, ordered the dismantling of the old synagogue building in Gaza. Its stones were to be reused to construct a fortress in nearby Ashkelon.

Upon hearing that Gaza’s abandoned synagogue would be destroyed, the former Jewish residents of Gaza now living in Hebron acted swiftly. They rushed back to Gaza and rescued the synagogue’s large decorated wooden doors before the building was torn down. These doors, carved from sycamore wood and adorned with Jewish symbols, would be the only remnants of the Gaza synagogue.

According to accounts from the time, the salvaged doors were carried to Hebron in a convoy of carts or camels. In Hebron, they installed the Gaza doors as the entrance doors of the Avraham Avinu Synagogue, effectively giving these artifacts a new home. Contemporary letters and recollections emphasize the significance of this act: even decades later, elders in Hebron recounted how the people of Gaza who came to Hebron brought with them the wooden doors of the ancient synagogue in Gaza and fixed them in the ancient synagogue in Hebron.

Historians note a poetic echo in this story: in the Bible, the hero Shimshon is said to have carried the gates of Gaza and deposited them on a hill near Hebron (Judges 16:3). In a spiritual sense, the 19th-century relocation of Gaza’s synagogue doors to Hebron mirrored that ancient event, underscoring how Gaza’s doors found refuge in Hebron.

The Gaza synagogue’s doors remained in place at Hebron’s Avraham Avinu Synagogue for roughly 94 years. They not only enhanced the Hebron synagogue’s sanctity but also reminded worshippers of the once-thriving Jewish life in Gaza. During this period, not only did the Jewish community in Hebron continue to flourish, but the Jewish presence in Gaza was renewed without, however, reaching anything close to the heights of its glorious past.

Tragically, the story came to a bitter end in 1929. That year, a wave of anti-Jewish riots swept British Mandate Palestine, and Hebron was the site of a horrific massacre. Arab mobs attacked the Jewish community of Hebron in late August 1929, killing 67 Jews and forcing the survivors to flee the city.

In the violence, the Avraham Avinu Synagogue – including its precious doors – was ransacked and desecrated. Eyewitnesses later described the synagogue’s interior as wrecked, holy books torn, and furniture smashed. The precious wooden doors from Gaza were lost amid the destruction. It is unclear if they were burned in the attack or stolen afterward, but no trace of them was ever found. Less than a century after being saved, the Gaza synagogue doors met the same fate as the community that had preserved them.

For decades after 1929, Hebron had no Jewish community, as under Jordanian rule, Jews were banned from returning to the city. The Avraham Avinu Synagogue stood in ruins – even used as a goat pen and garbage dump in the mid-20th century. When Israel regained control of Hebron in 1967, the synagogue was eventually rebuilt and completed in 1977, but the original Gaza doors were gone forever.

Nonetheless, the story of the synagogue doors from Gaza remains significant in Jewish history. It reminds us of the once-flourishing Jewish life in Gaza City and its connections to other Jewish communities in the Land of Israel.