Jewish Geography
Jewish scholar and research- er, to see these paintings,” says Joshowitz, a historian of Jew- ish visual culture based in Pitts- burgh. “I didn’t really know what the status was.” This fall, Joshowitz learned the astonishing answer. Not only had the paintings survived, but they had been preserved in their original arrangement, the way they first appeared more than 1,700 years ago. The answer was revealed when she arrived at the National Museum in Damascus alongside a delegation of Jewish scholars and leaders, in a trip made pos- sible by the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime. The trip was fa- cilitated by Rabbi Asher Lopatin, director of community relations for the Jewish Federation of Ann Arbor in Michigan, and Joe Jajati, grandson of a former lead- er of Syria’s Jewish community who founded the Syrian Mosaic Foundation. The Dura-Europos paintings, which are the earliest and largest known collection of synagogue paintings in the world, were painted around 244 CE. The seven-metre-high frescoes de- pict a wide array of Biblical sto- ries: Moses at the burning bush, the prophet Samuel anointing King David, Abraham and the binding of Isaac, and Mordecai riding on a horse led by Haman. The synagogue was filled with dirt just a decade after its con- struction, by the Roman garri- son stationed in the town along the Euphrates to help fortify the city ahead of an invasion. Af- ter the city was destroyed, the synagogue was lost to time un- til it was excavated in the 1930s,
when archeologists discovered that the layers of earth had pre- served its extensive wall paint- ings. Those paintings were later moved to the National Museum in Damascus, and are now housed in a replica of the ancient synagogue where they were created. “It was just thrilling to see these paintings that I had stud- ied and thought about for so long,” says Joshowitz. David Horovitz, founding editor of The Times of Israel , chronicled the
trip; he described an excitement that was palpable: “Somehow, all of our drivers, numerous secu- rity people, and several Syrian army soldiers have been drawn to the room, and are staring, as we all are, open-mouthed at the mesmeric paintings around us.” Previously able to study the paintings only via photographs that had been taken from the 1930s to the 1950s, Joshowitz says that seeing the paintings in person “gives me a greater sense of what this building was to the people who live there. ... I felt like I’d been transported to this desert town.” As access to Syria and the museum expands following the regime change, Jo- showitz hopes that “this incred- ible Jewish cultural artifact” will be restored as of one of the mu- seum’s crown jewels “for both the people of Syria and, really, all the Jewish people.” JTA
“The Pharaoh and the Child- hood of Moses,” one of the frescoes from Dura-Europos.
“It was just thrilling to see these paintings that I had studied and thought about for so long.”
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