Ben Ezra synagogue sometimes known as the El-Geniza synagogue or the Palestinian synagogue, is located in Old Cairo, Egypt.
According to local tradition, it is located at the site where the locals believe the baby Moses was found.2 A synagogue established by the prophet Jeremiah is also said to have operated at the site until it was destroyed by the Romans in 30 BC. C. The land of the current synagogue was bought in Fustat in 882, for 20,000 dinars by Abraham ibn Ezra of Jerusalem. Originally it was called the Isrelite Synagogue or "House of Meeting of the Israelites" in Hebrew. Destroyed in 1012 during the government of Al-Hakim bi-Amarallah, it was rebuilt between 1039 and 1041. It was later known as "Synagogue of the Prophet Elijah".
In the geniza of the synagogue more than one hundred thousand fragments of biblical and liturgical texts were found; books; letters and documents, written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Persian, and Yiddish. Some texts were compiled and studied by the Karaite scholar Abraham Firkovich, in 1863. It was the Jewish historian Solomon Schechter who began the mass study of the archives found. He had been alerted by two twin sisters, Agnes and Margaret, who were fond of studying ancient documents and who brought him a manuscript taken from the ash that Schechter quickly identified as a fragment of a Hebrew copy of the Syracid, 1 book of which he found then several chapters in geniza. In addition to having found a copy of the Damascus Document, later found in Qumran, for the first time, very valuable material has been found to document Jewish history between the 9th and 16th centuries, letters from Mesopotamia, Persia, Palestine, Syria, Sicily , Italy, Spain, Jazaria and Eastern Europe.