Recessed adjustable 75-W PAR38 fixtures are aimed at the
bimah's reading table from which the Torah is read at services.
From the architectural point of view, during the time of the ghetto, the synagogues were much simpler externally, but not in terms of the aron or
bimah. Later, with the opening of the ghetto gates, synagogue architecture changed and became more similar to the style of building outside the ghetto walls.
Gluck, observed the way some congregations indiscriminately invite youngsters of all ages to come dashing up onto the
bimah just before a service's conclusion, including the final one of Yom Kippur (Ne'ilah), and encourage them to mill around aimlessly as if at a playground.
"This is who is up on the
bimah [a synagogue's raised platforin where the Torah is read].
He also noted the raised
bimah at the opposite end of the room from the Ark, is also in Rococo motif.
The orange is a modern response to a comment a conservative rabbi once made about women becoming rabbis: "A woman belongs on the
bimah (the area from which the service is conducted) like an orange belongs on a Seder plate."
The men ceremoniously remove a Torah scroll from the ark and carry it around the sanctuary for worshipers to touch with their prayer shawls before it is placed on the
bimah and read.
Once, just as I was climbing the steps to the tebah (altar) to lead some prayers, a boy entered the synagogue and I was literally pulled off the
bimah to make room for him.
As the third aliyah, a woman, ascended the
bimah on a recent Saturday morning for the weekly Conservative service at the Jewish Cultural and Community Center (known by the English acronym JC3) in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, I reached for the only spiral-bound siddur left, one with a Spanish translation, and slipped into a seat in the former warehouse building, now renovated into a synagogue that is home to 198 members.
Above the
bimah, stage, there is a Ner Tamid, eternal light.
Inside is a sumptuous interior (Figures 2 and 3): a sanctuary of stained glass and elegant pews seating nearly twenty-five hundred people, a
bimah (elevated platform) framed by glittering mosaics, and an ark flanked by two large seven-branched menorahs.
The
Bimah, a wooden structure where religious scrolls known as Torah are read out during services, will also be relocated to Israel.