Picture a Day: A Picture a Day -- Announcing the Sabbath in Jerusalem 80 Years Ago

Friday, July 22, 2011

A Picture a Day -- Announcing the Sabbath in Jerusalem 80 Years Ago

Visit Jerusalem on a Friday afternoon and you are likely to hear in many neighborhoods a siren about 40 minutes before sundown. It’s a warning call for observant Jews that it is time to stop work, light Sabbath candles, go to the synagogue.

What did Jerusalemites do before electric sirens? Simple. They relied on the ancient alert system dating back to the Bible – the Shofar (ram’s horn).

These Library of Congress photos from the 1930s show the Sabbath Shofar blowers from both the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi communities.

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Published by Lenny Ben-David

About the title photograph of Jerusalem

The photograph, from the Library of Congress collection, was taken between 1860 and 1880 by Frank M. Good, according to the Library. But we can narrow down the dates a little further. The photo shows the Churva Synagogue dome on the left horizon between the two mosques' domes. The Churva was finished in 1864.

Most of the Library of Congress pictures are from photographers from the "American Colony" in Jerusalem, a group of Christian utopians -- often eccentric -- who lived in Jerusalem between 1881 and the 1940s. They returned to the U.S. and bequeathed their massive collection to the Library of Congress in 1978. The photos were digitalized in recent years.

A history of the American Colony Photography Department can be found in Jerusalem's American Colony and Its Photographic Legacy by Tom Powers and in an Institute for Palestine Studies article, Western Consumption and "Insider" Commercial Photography. Unfortunately, the latter article pays little attention to the photographs of Jews and Jewish sites.

Click on the photos to enlarge. Click on the captions to see the originals.

According to the Library of Congress, "there are no known restrictions on publication" of their photographs.