Pisa

Pisa was not as impressive as I thought it was going to be. That leaning tower, it is pretty small, compared to some of the other massive buildings we have seen in the past two weeks. The coolest part of the area around the Leaning Tower of Pisa was the land where it stood. When the Crusaders returned from the Holy Land, they brought back dirt from Acco and put it in this area. So technically speaking, when we sat on the green grass, we were sitting on Israeli soil.

If you were to pass by the synagogue building in Pisa, you would never know that it was a synagogue, as you can see by the picture. We knew where it was, and we could hardly find it. Once inside though, it was small but beautiful. The sanctuary was actually on the second floor, and it had a beautiful ceiling. Like most other synagogues, the original building was not kept completely intact, and we were seeing the nineteenth century restorations and reconstructions. I do not understand why the seats in most of these synagogues are so uncomfortable. A Christian friend once told me that Catholic churches do that on purpose, but I do not know why Jews had to copy that custom.



After the synagogue, we visited the Jewish cemetery, which had graves of Medieval Jews. It had Jews dating back hundreds of years, buried next to Jews who died recently. The Jewish cemetery stood outside of the city's walls. Pisa was and still is a small city, and the Jewish cemetery was just on the outside of the city's walls. One very interesting part of the cemetery was the room for the Chevrah Kadishe to wash and prepare the bodies for burial. They had a little room with what looked like a stone table on which to place the body. There the members of the Chevrah Kadishe blessed and dressed the body, just as they do today, except that they completed this mitzvah in the cemetery itself, I would imagine for convenience sake.