Built in 1859, the first synagogue was destroyed in 1941 during the Nazi era. A few stone blocks and a memorial plaque stand in its place today. When I was a child, I was taken to the old synagogue in Bischwiller on major Jewish holidays. In a bare space, illuminated by rows of crystal chandeliers, dominated by the Tablets of the Law on which the Decalogue was engraved in the Hebrew alphabet, protected by two sculpted Lions of Judah with beautiful curly manes, their round eyes fearsome and good-natured, crouched on the solid oak twisting columns that surrounded the Ark of the Covenant hidden from the profane, resounded the long nasal psalms sung by the faithful without choir or organ accompaniment. On the platform officiated the community's old cantor, the hazan Reb Abraham, supported in his melody-his thousand-year-old nigoun-by the sonorous singing of the entire assembly, in a strident, strange language-the ancestral Hebrew, rudely articulated and battered by the Alsatian Jews who had come from the countryside and who did not understand a single word of it... It was for me a hermetic language, an idiom at the same time exotic and intimate. I can still see myself walking in quick strides down the rue des Menuisiers, next to my parents dressed up. I held my grandfather Léopold's hand, dressed in an elegant financier and wearing his ceremonial top hat, known as Schabbèsdeckel, or Shabbat Lid. Under my left arm I proudly clutched the fine linen mappah (or wimpel) that I was to offer that Saturday at the synagogue in my hometown.