Belz Great Synagogue 2.92

The Belz Great Synagogue is the largest synagogue in Israel. It was built by the Belz Hasidic community with financial help from its supporters and admirers around the world.PlanningIn the 1980s, Rabbi Yissachar Dov Rokeach, the fifth Belzer Rebbe, spearheaded plans for the huge synagogue to be erected in the Kiryat Belz neighborhood of Jerusalem. The building, designed with four entrances accessible to each of the four streets of the hilltop neighborhood, would be an enlarged replica of the structure that the first Belzer Rebbe, the Sar Shalom, built in the town of Belz in 1843. It would include a grandiose main sanctuary, smaller study halls, wedding and bar mitzvah halls, libraries, and other communal facilities.ConstructionFunds for the ambitious, multimillion-dollar project were raised among Belzer Hasidim and were supplemented by various fund-raising projects throughout the 1980s and 1990s.Like the original synagogue, which took 15 years to complete, the new Belz synagogue that now dominates the northern Jerusalem skyline also took 15 years to construct. It was dedicated in 2000.Its main sanctuary seats 10,000 worshippers. The ornate wooden ark, an item for the Guinness Book of Records, is 12 meters high and weighs 18 tons. It has the capacity to hold 70 Torah scrolls. Nine chandeliers, each standing at 18ft high and 11ft wide, each contain over 200,000 pieces of Czech crystal.