February 2010

Hand sculpted and painted figures half and inch with costumes - © Geoff Robinson Photography

Last Erev Shabbat at JFC Shabbat service, we were blessed with a phenomenal presentation by our third graders. After their teachers treated us with a nice chanting of a passage of the Torah portion – Yitro – they proceeded to show us the research they did about the Temple in Jerusalem. Their curriculum this year is about the Synagogue, and they learnt all about the history of the two Temples, their construction, their destruction and great facts about their magnificence.

They presented us with the outstanding work of Alec Garrard, a Norfolk  in the United Kingdom retiree, who passionately devoted more than 30 years of patient labor to create a 1:100 scale model of Herod’s Temple, which is the last version of the Jerusalem Second Temple – the first one had been built by King Salomon around 960 BCE following his father’s plans and vision, King David who had not been elected to built it despite his desire, because he had been a soldier and engaged in bloody wars. The first Temple’s features are known through biblical texts.

The construction of the Second Temple started around 538 BCE after the return from exile in Babylonia, under the reign of Cyrus the Great who permitted the works to proceed. It took several stages to build, and several centuries later, around 20 BCE  King Herod decided to renovate, as a matter of fact to expand and rebuild the Temple that also became known as Herod’s Temple, until it was finally destroyed during the first war the Romans fought against the Jews. The destruction occured on Tisha b’Av of the Hebraic year 3830 which is the year 70 CE (if I did not make any mistake!).

The third grade class learnt about the features of the construction, thanks to the documentation of the incredible work of Alec Garrard who is beeing recognized today as the most accurate depiction of how the temple must have looked like at the time. I learnt a lot too! Sometimes you have an image in your mind that is a little distorted or blurry, but thanks to this presentation the Temple came to more life and it was an awesome feeling to try and imagine how life was in those times.

We spoke a little about the Western Wall, known as the only lasting vestige of that time. This wall was part of the outside walls surrounding the Temple, but not an actual wall in the Temple itself. I wondered how it came that it was not destroyed with the rest of the Temple, and of course I researched a little to figure out why. That’s how I learnt that as a matter of fact, the Romans had not intended to destroy the Second Temple at the time, and that it happened because of a torch that had  been thrown in the course of the fights, and that a raging and uncontrollable fire took up the entire building and tore it down completely.

I didn’t know lots of those interesting facts, did you?

You may want to  look at the gallery of pictures from Alec Garrard’s work here. Here is also the article that describes what he is doing (the work is still in progress).