lemuru: Er, no. Judas or, in the
Hebrew pronounciation, Yehuda, was one of
Jacob's sons and thus the
progenitor of one of the
Twelve Tribes of Israel (
Israel, incidentally, was Jacob's nomicker, after having bested an angel of God in a fight).
Judea, the name of the Jewish kingdom in and around the time of both the Maccabean Uprising (which the festival of Hanukkah commemorates) and later until the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, derives from the same origins - its layout roughly corresponds to the land originally alloted to the tribe of Yehuda after the conquest of the Promissed Land by Joshua.
Synagogues, however, were not in existence until after the destruction of the Temple, except in very remote locations, seeing as the Temple was the be all and end all of Jewish worship at that time. Epiphanes, therefore, erected his statue not in synagogues, but in the Temple itself.
Yehuda is still a popular, if somewhat antiquated, boy's name today.