Jews have been scattered across the globe throughout all of recorded history. Communities grew for thousands of years in continents as diverse as Africa to Europe and Asia.
The lives of Jews in these diverse communities alternated between periods of relative calm and freedom to eras of terrible prejudice and oppression. Antisemitism has plagued the world for more than 2,000 years and continues to resurface even today.
In fact, the entire world map of Jewish communities has been rewritten in the last hundred years. The Holocaust wiped out the majority of Europe's Jewish communities and most Jews that lived under Arab rule fled or were expelled in the aftermath of the foundation of the State of Israel. While large, new communities thrived in countries such as the United States other communities that had existed for many hundreds, even thousands of years, completely disappeared from the face of the map.
No matter where Jews lived however, the focal point of every community was the synagogue where Jews would gather to recite prayers and read every week from the Sefer Torah - the hand written scroll that contains the Hebrew bible.
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