Convener: Professor Yaacov Yadgar
Speaker: Dr Davidi Borabeck
This paper will focus on synagogues in the urban internal frontier in Israel following the 1948 war and the Nakba. Following the 1948 war and the collapse of Palestinian urbanity, several administrative initiatives were held by the authorities to demonstrate sovereignty in these urban ethnocracies. Among these initiatives were the establishment of new synagogues.
Two significant features were highlighted in these newly constructed Israeli synagogues – their architectural design and location within urban space. Synagogues were built in monumental dimensions and were located in locations where they would overshadow other religious buildings and extract Israeli surveillance over the surviving Palestinians in the urban sphere. Thus, the synagogues, as well as the communities that gathered around them, were harnessed into the Zionist colonial policy in the urban sphere and served as national-sovereign agents.
This phenomenon is demonstrated through close analysis of archival documents in several urban frontiers in the State of Israel and point out the implications of this shift in various contexts by illustrating five examples of synagogues in Haifa, Jaffa, Ramla, and Natzrat-Illit.
These examples demonstrate the shift in synagogues role within Jewish society and theology – from places of worship and longevity to the destroyed Temple to symbols of Jewish sovereignty. Moreover, these synagogues demonstrate a shift in the role of religion in Jewish society following the establishment of the state of Israel.
David Borabeck is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. His research focuses on the relations between nationalism, colonialism, religion, and ethnicity. In his dissertation, written under the supervision of Prof. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin and Dr. Menashe Anzi, Borabeck examined the unique role of religion in the solidification of the Jewish-Israeli national collective and Zionist nation-building. Borabeck illustrates the uniqueness of this role as demonstrated by the activity of the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was comprised exclusively of Zionist Orthodox Jews (Religious-Zionist Jews) in the first decades of the state.
Borabeck's current study focus on the relations between sovereignty and sanctity in Israel/Palestine. His intention is to explore the triple relationship between religion, ethnicity, and nationalism through the recontextualisation of sacredness and sacred places in Israel in relation to the sovereign state. He does so through a spatial analysis of Jewish and Muslim sacred sites in Israel and the West Bank.
During his graduate studies in the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, Borabeck received the Rottenstreich Fellowship for Outstanding Doctoral Students awarded by The Council for Higher Education of Israel, as well as a stipend from the Study of Modern Jewish Culture I-Core research group, and a faculty scholarship from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Additionally, Borabeck was a Doctorate fellow at Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters in Ben Gurion University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Haifa Laboratory for Religious Studies in Haifa University, Israel.
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