Synagogue בית כנסת

The synagogue grew where the Temple was out of reach: tradition traces the first houses of assembly to the Babylonian exile, and of the dispersion Ezekiel is told "I have become for them a small sanctuary"—which the sages read of synagogues and study houses. By the end of the Second Temple synagogues stood across the land and in Jerusalem itself—the Talmud counts four hundred and eighty.

For prayer a synagogue is not required—a minyan of ten gathers anywhere; but it is what made the Jewish community portable: a scroll, a reading table, an ark facing Jerusalem—and the community lives at any point of the globe. Destroying synagogues was always the first act of persecution—and building a new one the exiles' first deed.