Church of the Week: Ben Ezra Synagogue, Cairo, Egypt

Last week here on the Desperate Pastor Blog, I featured one of the churches we visited in Cairo (but in which we were not permitted to take photos), the Church of the Holy Family (see the Hither & Yon blog entries here and here for accounts of some of the places we couldn't photograph on our most recent Holy Land/Egypt trip).

This week, I thought I'd feature the first ever synagogue as "Church of the Week." The famous Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo was originally a Christian church, which the Coptic Christians of Cairo had to sell to the Jews in 882 AD in order to pay the annual taxes imposed by the Muslim rulers of the time. The church was purchased by Abraham Ben Ezra, who came from Jerusalem during the reign of Ahmed Ibn Tulun, for twenty thousand dinars.