When the Rabbi said there should be a Torah Center, he arranged that a room in the new lower level should be set aside for it. Morris “Mershy” Franco was a dedicated leader of the community, and he followed every word of Hacham Baruch. This continued from February until June, because in the summer the entire community disbanded and moved to the Jersey Shore.” The groups would be in halachah and hashkafah, for men, women and children, and it would be called the Shaare Zion Torah Center. We filled the place, and we kept announcing that we were going to have classes in English, Hebrew and Arabic. I brought in some of the top speakers available: Rabbi Yissocher Frand, Rabbi Pesach Krohn, and others. “We initiated something we called ‘First Tuesday’ where, on the first Tuesday of each month, we invited all the men and women of the community to come to the Dome in Shaare Zion for a lecture. When I suggested we start next year, he said, ‘No! Immediately!’ So we began announcing at the few minyanim in Shaare Zion that we have a Torah Center, and we began building his dream. “One morning, Hacham Baruch called me aside and said, ‘If we do not have serious Torah learning, there will be no Shaare Zion twenty-five years from now.’ At the time, the building was under construction for an expansion, and Hacham Baruch wanted us to develop a Torah Center. His arrival heralded the start of a revolution of sorts, as he showed that Torah learning in a serious manner was the way Judaism was practiced in the old country, and the way it was currently being practiced in New York was not the traditional track of Syrian Jewry. In the late 1980s, Hacham Yom Tob Yedid, zt”l, arrived in New York from Aleppo (Chaleb), Syria, with a group of Jews who had preserved the heritage and traditions of Chaleb.

Many American Jews of Syrian descent had been raised in an atmosphere that being a businessman was in conflict with being a ben Torah. On Shabbat, the various Rabbis of the congregation delivered moving drashot which inspired the upkeep and strengthening of a community which excelled in their charitable giving in support of noble causes. Shaare Zion was built to function as a k’nees, or bet knesset, along with an adjoining social hall to host celebrations of weddings and other joyous gatherings. Completed in 1960, it seats thousands of congregants, who come together each week to pray in their time-honored tradition and to socialize with extended family along with generational friends. However, the places where people come on a constant basis to study Torah is compared to the Bet Hamikdash, and Hashem has a greater affinity for it than the other holy houses of prayer and occasional study.Ĭongregation Shaare Zion, the flagship synagogue of the Syrian-Jewish community in Brooklyn, has a long, storied history. Rabeinu Yonah (ad loc) explains that the synagogues, where people come to pray, have a high measure of holiness, as do the study halls where people come intermittently to study and hear drashot. Rav Chisda said, “What is meant when it is written (Tehillim, 87:2), ‘Oheiv Hashem Shaare Zion mikol mishkenot Yaakob − Hashem loves the gates of Zion more than the all the sanctuaries of Yaakov’? Hashem loves the gathering places distinguished in halachah more than synagogues and study halls.” (Berachot, 8:a) By Rabbi Binyomin Zev Karman Congregation Shaare Zion.

Itorah gemara