Visit "The Coolest Shul in Israel" With Mishpacha's Rabbi Ephraim Schwartz

[Music] welcome to echo and uh we're standing outside over here the shul the tunisian synagogue i like to tell peace tourists when they're here that they are at the coolest shul in eritissaro um now you know i must be telling the truth because if i'm a tour guide you're not allowed to go ahead and make up stuff it's uh you know against the rules so if i tell you that this is the coolest jewel then you certainly know that it has to be the crucial what makes this shul so unique so this shule was actually built by a jewish name was sion badash and we'll talk a little bit more about him inside uh but zion had three major passions in his life the first passion was he loved claudius there's nothing more he loved jews he had a tremendous passion for every single year that he met the second passion he had a tremendous love for eric israel right he's and we'll talk a little bit more some of his stories inside of him but his love for archiza was unsurpassed his third passion was the history of the jewish people it's a tremendous history buff and he loved jewish history all three of those elements come together in a form of artwork called mosaics right what is mosaics mosaics is the ancient way of going ahead and uh decorating shules in the times of the mission and the talmud we find lots of shores and almost every one of them has in them some type of mosaics so this shula as we'll see when we go inside over there is entirely mosaics from floor to ceiling to walls it's mind-blowing let's just take a look here at the outside if you'll notice on the outside over here we have different archways over here the first archway is it says voracious schmos vayikra bamidbar as well we have six of them zrayim nashim nizikim kachim and taharis the shisha sidre mishna and each of those archways have sukim that follow that tell you a little bit about the versatile for example this rhyme you see um we have different platforms over here which different pictures of different holidays we have over there moshe rabino harsinai shavuos we see david and goliath you see there's the little tillam and the ah and the harp and the crown here we have chanukah you have the maccabees the kashmir and fighting against the elephants over there with the greeks and on top you see the latkes and the dreidel and the maccabees on this side we have a kadas yitzhak and you can see over there there's the hand that's on the concentration on the on the barbed wire there from the uh from the concentration camp the serious snefish different things in the middle here we have a tremendous platform where we have the the sarah sadibros the pictures of the swat team so as you can see these are just a little taste of what we're going to feel when we go inside of the shul so come with me inside let's head on and see let's see what we can see so now we've come into the shoe we are in the entrance hallway over here and take a look around i mean this is like marvelous you're looking around there you're seeing something that you've never been you felt like you landed on a different planet a mosaic planet but if you take a look each piece of mosaic has different meaning to it so for example as we look around over here on the floor let's start with the floor first we have here on the floor here we have all of the fish of eric you saw that our indigenous territory so we're all in the first column on the second column we have all of the flowers that our indigenous charities are all the third column over here we have all of the birds that are here and natural to heritage oil and finally in the middle we have the shivas all of the shivasaminim that are here a natural terrorist israel on the wall behind me we're going to see a few lines over here of different coins of eritrea sorel we're going to go through four floors and we're going to see every single coin that they've discovered in this country from the times of brahmavino and even later the romans the greeks the crusader all different periods we're gonna see different coins and that follows us up through four floors as we go through the building and then we have on the wall the story of the jewish people it starts behind me over here when we come down to mitzrayim when we first go into gulls eren's goshen it continues by imaru eschayhem the story of the jews being persecuted in egypt building the pyramids susv rama yam we have the miragulum coming in territorial surrounding the city of eureka blowing the chauffeur seven times and the walls come tumbling down behind that over there we have the map of arcgis we finally made it into israel on the wall opposite me over here we have something that is known and this was something in the 1500s that was known as the concept called the arba are kurdish of heritage israel the four holy cities of eric israel can you name them do you know what the four holy spears are let's talk about them the first holy city we have is known as chevron and there you've got a picture of maharashtra next to it we have a picture of tsvat the second of the holy cities right and we see that there's a little picture of the davidka the cave of the aryaka dosh right and all of the tadika reviews of cairo that are buried there in the cemetery of swat next to that we have the third of the are kodesh and that's of course the city of tavaria ferry is the water you see the beautiful king art over there we have the farm over there arabi akiva the rambam the schlock even the imos did you know that the emos are buried in uh now the emotes aren't covered now aren't they well you see over there it says billa and zilpah alisheva miriam they're also buried in various maybe when we do our variator we'll get to talk about them and then of course we have yerushalayim your schleim has a few panels here it's the most beautiful almost important city we start with the hotel we go outside we have shah shaham a little bit further there on harassing of shalom and finally we see the jewish people moving outside of yusuf to the first jewish neighborhood in the eighteen hundreds we have risk for those that have been in your slime on top of us we've got can you believe it it's the best amigdas we have the ezra's nostrim over here the estras take a look over there we have the heihal you see the minority you see them as bach you see the credesh hakodo shim right this is eritseroff are you beginning to feel the passion that ceon had let's talk a little bit about seal come with me let's sit down and i'll show you a model that they made of seal okay so here we have tsiyon i missed siam i used to meet him here every single day he's here every morning from chakras till the afternoon till milka he would stop he would tell us his story tell us about the shul theon was born in tunis and as a child they always dreamed of coming their just oil he learned hebrew at a very young age he was born during the before the war before world war ii the nazis came to a city he says they lied them all down on the floor they came into his house they were waiting for the bullet to come they died and just make it over hashem already but hashem had other plans he would tell me and they set them free if 1948 came the war was over the first boat that came territorial he comes over to artistrol he was a young man at the time they land in eretz israel and he's greeted by a haganah soldier he hands him this big heavy check rifle and he takes the rifle tion he picks it up he says the soldier tells him fight now's your chance join the army welcome to israel as they like to tell you over here he takes the rifle he picks it up over his head he goes baruch hashem allah not only have this course to go ahead and to come territorial to live in eritrea but i have a gun i can fight i can defend the jewish people i could defend hashem's land and whenever he would tell me this and this could sometimes be two three times a week he would start to cry just the memory would go ahead and uh and awaken in him those feelings of passion that he had for arts israel um he said when they came to it that when he joined the army he was the city of akko at that time was a yamchalar of him it was full of arabs he said the israeli army came here the arabs all fled the city what did he do he said the israeli government they didn't flee in order to leave they fled in order to come back again and join the arab legion and fight once again in eretz israel xion said that after the war the arabs were not coming back hashem had a different plan for them and the israeli government comes over he said take whatever land you want sit settle the city make it yours sion gets up in front of the in front of the israeli government at that time and he says the first is that you're not allowed to go ahead and live in a city unless it has a shul and there were no shules in akka at that time the arabs had destroyed any semblance of anything jewish at that time the government says okay you know what here's an empty field come take this field build the field build whatever you want over here this could be your shul he used to tell me he goes 70 years we've been sitting here trying to build this rule and we still haven't finished yet right it's still in the process of being built he goes but akko has grown he goes today i live in akko my children live in jamaica my taco my grandchildren live in akko there are hundreds of shules yeshivas kola lim army bases hezder yeshivas he goes i live here my children my grandchildren and lanu darkon we don't have a passport we waited two thousand years to come to this country we're not leaving for anything that was the passion of tion and that's the person that built this shulk we have entered into the weekday chapel right after right next to the hallway over here this is the where they darven during the week and as you can see this is also full of mosaics all over on the floor here we're getting flowers the birds the trees and in the middle here we even see the wild animals of virginia we have the name the leopard the lion the zev the beer right we have all of the birds over here along the wall here we have against different angles of the basal mig-dash the shah meshulas the southern wall we have on this side coins from all the different tufas just like i told you there you are from the barkokova battles over there there you have from jordus herrera who built the base amigdas on top of us we have a replica of a map from the 1800s of what eritrea looked like in that period of time and in the far back corner over there there's something really fascinating that we'll talk a little bit more about it says akko ir banachlas shaven usher we are in the biblical portion of shavit usher but then underneath it it has some very interesting writing we've never seen this before but this is in fact klaviyate dot this is ancient hebrew and it says the word akko. below that it says it in hieroglyphics see that little bird that's ancient egyptian and yes the city of akka was even before the jews were here the city of akko there were people living here this is one of the longest inhabited cities in the world let's go upstairs and start to look at the rest of the show we have entered into the hallway we're going to be going up the stairs now and not an inch of this building was not used from cfas over here i like to play a game with my tourists right we're going to point out different biblical stories toy stories from tanakh and let's see if you can figure out who they are so right over here on the stair we have one wall with a picture of one person can you figure out who it is there's a bird there's somebody wrapping something on his head somebody doing something with a child fire bowing down people getting killed and then going up to shamayim in a fiery chariot well somebody is singing obvi crying avi avi rechrav israel this is of course is the story of elia ohanavi here's our carmel here it's doing kriyasa mason and the va habal on this side we have a battle some of these two people are holding up his hands that's maisha rabino iron and of course and below we can see yeshua fighting down in the little corner over there even we see something there's a bush it's on fire right and there's of course not being burnt up that's mushroom and the snail that is over there notice how he made most of the faces over here they don't have any pictures of people noses and this and that again that's to go ahead to keep with that you shouldn't have images of people in the shul so this is the staircase let's go up further as we're going to continue through our journey in jewish history we have come up another flight upstairs and here we see an interesting map those of you that might have been in yerushalayim might have seen this part of the map this map is called the mediba map it was a map that was found on the floor of a church in jordan it comes from the byzantine period about the 5th 6th century or so um a few hundred years after the corbin vasa amigdas and why would we have a map of a church from a floor of a church of a byzantine period the byzantines were romans that had converted to christianity and they conquered most of the world including erich's role and this is the part of the map that has to do with energy's role again why is that important to us well it's very important to archaeologists for example if i want to go and excavate the city of beersheva or the city of oshkolon or the city of lakesh i'm going to look at this map and it'll tell me exactly what i should find so by oscar and i see a big road over there with a car doe on top of it with no wall around it beersheva i see a little entrance way again no wall with a big administrative center when i look at the city of all of laches there's a hill with a double gated entrance inside of it when we go to these places we discover all of those things so it's a great tool to use for archaeologists but to me what's the most important about this is of course usually in fact your slime was the most important part for the byzantines as well because your slime was the holy city and what they see is a map of yerushalayim what we find over here is a cardo going down the center of your line which of course we find this would be right this would be a church that they have over there and then we see another gate over here and wow another cardo that we discovered to me what's most incredible about this is not what you see though it's what you don't see see what's missing on the map of your schleich you know what's missing what we don't see we don't see the harabayas we don't see the base something we don't see the kotel even right we don't see any of that why not well this is as i said after the corporate base amigos but still don't we know that there's a big harabayas and there's a big golden mosque on top of it a dome on top of it right where is that well this is before the muslims came towards israel and ghazal tell us that when hadrian came after the barack obama revolt and destroyed yerushalayim right he plowed down the harabayas and there was nothing left of it it's hard for us to relate to that because we see the coastal we see the golden mosque on top of it but if you want to see what ghazal are talking about it's this there is no our bias there is no kotel it would be somewhere around over here and we don't see anything so once again this is important for us to get a feel of what the hormone meant as opposed to what we see today we continue going up the stairs here and again more pictures we're getting into the fourth floor over here we see some pictures from the later naveem there's three boys in a fiery furnace right over here we have the daniel in the lion's den on top of us we have bell shots our with the pseudo with the handwriting on the wall up above and finally we make our way up here to the last floor we're looking up in the gag and all around me i see a map an incredible map and to me this is the most meaningful place of the entire picture because here we see a statement it says kadish israel dedicated to the communities of israel and we see different countries turkey istanbul bulgaria on top of me we see poland moravia austria italia but take a look closely if you see we have those little buildings over there there's like little triangles can you read what it says next to it auschwitz birkenau yasi belgits these are all concentration camps right this is a map of the entire middle east entire world really before the nazis wiped out the jewish communities over here six million jews and then look what happens after all of this comes the jews slowly return to heritage and they return slowly slowly slowly returning back to rebuild hashem yerushalayim and what does it say hashem do you know what we just did now we just went through four thousand years of jewish history we started on the bottom with ered gershon the jews first going into gullahs and then we followed the story coming into israel through the gullahs through the hormone bastards coming all the way up and finally we've returned here to eretz israel and here we finish our map right here with the return of the jewish people there at israel so this is the staircase so to speak the staircase of the jewish people now we're going to go inside of the shul see the ezra's notion and we'll conclude by the main sanctuary of the shul we've entered into the ladies section the top floor the bulk the balcony over here we have different frames that are all connected to women to marriage on the first frame over there we see surrey meaning and we see the three malachim next to her over there we have rifka coming off of the camel yitzchak dancing not dancing hiding behind the bookshelf over there davening minha rivka by the way falls off the camel i always like to tell my tourists especially when i have girls that are in shidduchim it's a big schooler to fall off a camel right as soon as rivka fell off the camel she found her bar shirt so nothing to be scared about over there we have russ sotznias picking up the sheaves of wheat there's queen esther over there and over here we have a woman with six little boys and a little girl that's of course leia and right next to her by this well with a big heavy rock that nobody could take off and there's jacob avino checking out his bachelorette rahul in the middle here we have a big suva cole sausandra called over there we have the brachos of the hadley near shall shabbas right and on the bottom here on the floor i was actually they just did this about seven years ago like fish we have all the different fish right so this is the lady section and the related to ladies now i'd like you to come over here and we're going to look down below because you always get an incredible view when you look down from the top wow that's what everybody says when they take a look down here it's incredible we're looking at the main shule over here and take a look at all the beautiful mosaics that we have the birds the lakes the rivers all of the things that we've speak we've spoken about here that are indigenous to eritrea sorel and the walls on the side here with the mclaren second ocean we have maharashtra we have cava rocco mig dal david the kotel here's your mayor balanese ashkenaz and sward rabbi shimon bar yochai we have the prayer for the state of israel right this is the main shul now one of the most incredible things about mosaics is that i don't know if you appreciate is that mosaics is not painted rocks this is all original colored stones one of the things that ceon would tell me all the time because you know why the first place i make this was destroyed the reason why the first base i make dish was destroyed is because it was built with the cedar trees of hiram the king of tsar gaesha material he goes the second base that makes it was built with the financing of koresh and that's why it was destroyed the third base matrix will be nets ahmed zakim because it all comes from arith israel he goes this shul is ned sachnet because this shul every single rock comes from erit israel all of the labor was done by a kibbutz that he would hire that would go ahead and uh do the do the design and putting together the mosaics so this school is lynetza all the windows were painted by jewish people with all the different stories of tanakh i'd like to go down to the main sanctuary we're going to go up to the last piece over here which is the beautiful orange and we'll talk about that okay we are in the main sanctuary we come to the irenko dish and as we notice there's a few orange dishes over here this was the last project of tsion's life that he was working on was these aren't kodishes take a look this is silver and each one of these iron cordages have different symbolism to them on the bottom here we have the shul that it looked like that he came from in tunis over here we have something very interesting take a look over here we see there's a hole with a gallows hanging down over here and then it says on top hashem assailant from al-qaeda their sacrifice was holy sichuan let's remember the fighters of the etz of elechi that left the jail in akko right that that that broke out of the prison over there and we'll talk about that story there in akko so this is uh dedicated to the soldiers and the liberation of the city of akko this is iron koda's number one our encode is number two we have a picture over here of course of cave araco on the sides over here we can see there's a picture of a concentration camp barbed wire hashem the korean hashem should avenge the cursed nazis a yellow star jude lazakur millionaire this was this iron cottage was dedicated to the six million that perished in the holocaust and that's of course the third rn kodesh that we approach over here this is the interior of his shul in tunis and this was the first one that was actually done and on the sides over here we have the shvatim we have ruvain shimon levy all of the different schwatten in the middle over there on the wall hamala hagoya simi kara yavarika shem the first r encoders that he dedicated in silver was for jewish children for life being reborn again and there's a tila that women say when they light candles inside here we have each one of the iron coat dishes has different filos inside of them this one over here we have the special tequila for when women light candle for jewish children this previous one over here we have a yiskar for the kidosha showa in it here we have the kel male rachel for the people that died in the holocaust [Music] and now we have the last iron kodesh that he did this one of course you have a picture of the hotel um and it says and then on the side here we have different insignias from all the different army units we have the cannon brigade the medical way the communications the soldiers the fighting the infantry right this is dedicated to the jewish soldiers and inside here we have a misha barrack for all of the soldiers and over here we have a history prayer for all of the soldiers that gave their lives in the battles of eretz israel so these are the iron cottages that he succeeded he wanted to do all of them he did not but how many aren't kurdishes do we have over here let's count we have one two three four five six seven why do we have seven iron cur dishes over here we'll take a look behind us over there and what do we see on the wall opposite us one two three four seven sharim to go into your salam shariafo sharacha dash shreem s right what do we sing on simcha's torah when we put our safer torahs back into the iron kodash see you shiyarim rasheed correspond to the sha'arim of yerushalayim that was the concept why we have seven orange kardashes over here people come here and they put quit luck inside of this iron curtain dish people come here almost not a day that comes by that community people don't come come here to make asgard memorials because of this jewel it's a little hidden treasure here in the special city of akko and we truly owe this beauty to the passion of worked his entire life in a post office he said he used to fought in 1948 he fought in 1967 he fought in the um kippur war they told him he was already too old by then to fight anymore and he worked in the post office a simple yid but with such a love such a passion for eritreal for claudia's role may his memory be blessed and may our inspiration from his beautiful beautiful show that he left us with be something that stays with us forever