מעלין בקודשThe Journey

The route begins below grade, as the descent to the Worms mikvah. In a dark room a sofer writes by candlelight on the eve of the First Crusade: the quill, the ink, the klaf, and the community that would be lost that spring.

Speyer, Worms and Mainz, the three Rhineland kehillos whose takanos and minhagim shaped Ashkenaz, and in whose scriptoria the Ashkenazi script took its form.

The schools of Rashi’s grandsons and their heirs across France and Germany, and the Maharam of Rothenburg, who died a prisoner at Ensisheim and was buried in Worms fourteen years later.

The Erfurt manuscripts, the massacres of the plague years, and the long chain of expulsions that pushed Ashkenazi Jewry east toward Bohemia and Poland.

Cordoba, Granada, Toledo and Barcelona: the Rif, the Rambam’s birthplace, the Ramban, the Rashba and the Tur; the massacres of 1391 and the disputations; the Expulsion of 1492 and the forced conversion in Portugal in 1497; the Inquisition and the anusim who kept faith in secret.

Salonika, Constantinople and Izmir, Safed and the Shulchan Aruch, Venice and Livorno, the Portuguese of Amsterdam, the Balkans. The room ends with the Churban of the Sephardic Mediterranean: Salonika’s deportations of 1943, Rhodes, Kos and Corfu in 1944, Rome in October 1943, Amsterdam, Sarajevo, and the deportations from Thrace and Macedonia.

The Geonim of Sura and Pumbedisa; the Jews of Persia and the forced conversion of Mashhad in 1839; Yemen, the Mawza exile of 1679 and the Orphans’ Decree; the Damascus blood libel of 1840 and the Aleppo Codex, damaged in the riots of December 1947; Cairo and the Genizah; the Farhud in Baghdad on Shavuos 1941, the Aden riots of 1947, the hangings in Baghdad in 1969, and the exodus of 1949 to 1951 on Operation Magic Carpet and Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

Fez and the Rif, Kairouan and Djerba, the Rambam’s years in Fez, the mellah; Vichy’s laws in Morocco and Algeria from 1940, the Giado camp in Libya in 1942, the German occupation of Tunisia in 1942 and 1943, the Tripoli pogrom of November 1945, the riots of 1948 and 1967, and the departure of nearly a whole Jewry to Israel and France.

From the Statute of Kalisz to the Council of Four Lands: Prague, Krakow, Lublin, the printing houses, the Rema and the Maharal, and a Jewish world that grew to be the largest on earth.

The Chmielnicki massacres of 1648 and 1649 and the wars that followed, told through the kinos written for them and the communities that rebuilt.

Medzhybizh, Mezritch and the courts that followed; Karlin by Pinsk and the beginnings of Chabad in Liozna, Liadi and Lubavitch, with the niggunim, the seforim and the shtiblach of two centuries. The gallery opens into the Chassidus Hall.

A hall in three around a working shtiebel and a tisch table: the courts before the war, from Medzhybizh to Ger, Belz, Sanz, Vizhnitz, Satmar, Bobov, Karlin and Lubavitch; the Rebbeim in the Churban, from the Piaseczno Rebbe’s Aish Kodesh buried in Warsaw to the Bluzhever Rebbe’s Chanukah lights in Bergen-Belsen; and the courts rebuilt in Williamsburg, Boro Park, Monsey, Bnei Brak, Jerusalem, Kiryat Sanz and Antwerp.

The Vilna Gaon and his kloiz, Volozhin and the yeshivos that followed it, the Mussar movement, Telz, Mir, Slabodka and Radin, and the printing presses of Vilna. The gallery opens into the Yeshiva Hall.

A hall in three around a working beis medrash rebuilt after Shaar HaTorah of Grodno under Rav Shimon Shkop: the yeshivos before the war, from Volozhin to Mir, Slabodka, Telz, Radin, Kamenitz, Kletzk and Grodno; the yeshivos in the Churban, Rav Shimon’s death in Grodno under Soviet rule in the autumn of 1939, the students who fled to Vilna, the Mir in Shanghai; and the yeshivos rebuilt, Telz in Cleveland, Lakewood, Ponevezh, Mir in Brooklyn and Jerusalem, Grodna in Ashdod, and the Siyum HaShas of January 2020. Grodno’s own authority on the scribal law, Piskei Chamudei Daniel of Rav Daniel of Horodna, has its station here.

All of it: the Pale of Settlement, the cantonists, the Haskalah and the Bund, the Rebbe Rashab’s last years in Rostov, and the Soviet decades, with the underground minyan as a real room off the gallery.

Pressburg and the Chasam Sofer, the Hungarian yeshivos, the Galician courts of Belz, Sanz and Bobov, Munkacs and the Carpathian towns, to the deportations of 1944.

Frankfurt and Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, Berlin and the Hildesheimer seminary, the communities of the Rhine and the west, to Kristallnacht.

The founding of Agudas Yisroel at Kattowitz, Bais Yaakov, the Daf Yomi, the great yeshivos at their height, and the ordinary Shabbos of a world that did not know it was ending.

The American soldiers who opened the gates, the chaplains, the DP camps, the Survivors’ Talmud printed under the United States Army, the Klausenburger Rebbe in Föhrenwald, the children, and the birth of the State of Israel.

Lakewood, Ponevezh, Mir, Telz, Chevron and Grodna; the courts of Satmar, Belz, Ger, Bobov, Klausenburg, Vizhnitz, Skver and Lubavitch; Operation Magic Carpet and Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, the exodus from the Arab lands, Porat Yosef and the Sephardic Torah renaissance; the refuseniks and the Soviet exodus of 1989 to 1991.

The Siyum HaShas at MetLife Stadium on January 1, 2020, with more than ninety thousand present; Daf Yomi on every continent; yeshivos larger than any that stood in Europe; the courts in Brooklyn, Monsey, Lakewood, Bnei Brak, Jerusalem, London and Antwerp; and a sofer writing the next Sefer Torah, which is where the Bridge leads.

Across the Bridge of Rising Letters to the highest floor in the building. A sofer writes each man’s letter in a new Sefer Torah as his shaliach; each woman takes on a mitzvah; every visitor leaves with a letter.