Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by Lasdun James

Author:Lasdun, James [Lasdun, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-02-12T08:00:00+00:00

Part IV

Mosaic

I am uneasy when confronted with my own work …

—Freud, Moses and Monotheism

In the year 1700 a group of Polish Jews emigrated to Jerusalem. The journey was hard and by the time they arrived they were in ill health and penniless. Borrowing money from the Arab community, they built a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter, not far from the Wailing Wall. But their leader died, and before long they defaulted on their debt and the creditors burned down the building. Ever since then, the site it stood on has been known as the “Hurva,” which is the Hebrew word for “ruin.”

For more than a century the ruin lay undisturbed, and then in 1864 a second synagogue was built on the same site, this time by Lithuanians, followers of the influential rabbi known as the Vilna Gaon: the “Genius of Vilnius.” Their version of the building, designed for them by the Turkish sultan’s own architect and modeled on the domed and arched mosques of Constantinople, dominated the skyline of the Jewish Quarter for almost a century and came to be regarded as the official synagogue of Old Jerusalem. Theodor Herzl spoke there. The first British high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, paid a ceremonial visit in 1920. But in 1948, during the War of Independence, it too was destroyed, blown up by the Jordanian army as they took the Old City.

The Vilna Gaon, a revered figure in Orthodox Judaism, left behind a prophecy stating that three versions of the Hurva synagogue would be built, and that completion of the third would bring about the rebuilding of the Great Temple in Jerusalem. The rebuilding of the Temple is a dream cherished by all sorts of religious cults and associated, variously, with the arrival of the Jewish Messiah, the Second Coming of Christ, the Rapture, and the End of Days.

In 1967, during the Six-Day War, the Israelis captured the Old City and set about reconstructing the Jewish Quarter, which had been largely flattened. The project was overseen by the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, a cultured, liberal figure, legendary for his expansive spirit and tireless energy. In time Kollek turned his attention to the rubble of the Hurva synagogue and proposed yet another incarnation: the fateful third.

His ambitions for this version were grandly international. It would be both a civic and an architectural statement; a showcase for his vision of a reunited, enlightened, globally minded new Jerusalem. The first architect he appointed was the American pioneer of modernism Louis Kahn, who worked on it until his death in 1974. His plans were admired but not, in the end, adopted, and the project went dormant. But in 1978 Kollek took it up again, appointing a new architect, to whom he spelled out his rather exalted vision of the building:

“I fully believe that we will witness the creation of a religious and spiritual focus for world Jewry.”

The new architect was my father. For several years he shuttled back and forth between London and Jerusalem, working almost exclusively on the project.

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