For nearly two millennia, from the year 70 until 1948 and the founding of Israel, the Jewish people were without a homeland. But wherever they wandered in the great Diaspora, the tradition of building synagogues continued, not only as a refuge for their beliefs but as a testament to their strength and their accomplishments as a people. And I Shall Dwell Among Them: Historic Synagogues of the World preserves the irreplaceable spiritual, architectural, and cultural significance of these structures.

It is the first study to document the synagogues with both scholarly depth and photographic excellence. Photographer Neil Folberg, a former student of Ansel Adams, lives with his family in Jerusalem. For the last three years he has traveled the world, visiting Jewish communities past and present and photographing both grand-scale and modest synagogues in places as far-ranging as India, the Czech Republic, Israel, the American South, and the Caribbean islands.

Augmenting the photographs in And I Shall Dwell Among Them: Historic Synagogues of the World is an essay focusing on the social and cultural history of the Jews by Yom Tov Assis, a distinguished scholar of Jewish culture and history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Neil Folberg's first-person account of making the photographs accompanies each of the chapters, which are divided by the geographic regions of his extensive travels.

In Morocco, Italy, Hungary, the Middle East - anywhere throughout the world where Jews settled - the synagogues were built. Since they had no theologically prescribed architectural design, the buildings directly reflected the prevailing style of their immediate environment.

Folberg has documented both palatial and humble synagogues of all varieties, from the magnificently furnished structure in Augsburg, Germany, with its gleaming wood and luminous chandeliers, to the modest Abramov House Synagogue, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, which was converted from a private home. These and dozens of other sites are magnificently represented here in color photographs of astonishing depth and richness.