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The synagogue, or shul, has been the place card for Jews throughout the world for thousands of years. As a people of diaspora, all too often all that remains of a once vibrant community years later is its synagogue, and perhaps its cemetery. Often the synagogue and cemetery are gone as well; sometimes a trace remains. As a people of diaspora, we find these buildings, and traces of buildings throughout the world. They reflect the aesthetic and the spirit of the Jewish people from the Middle East, to China, to India, to Morocco, to Spain, to England, to the United States, and all stops in between.
Until very recently it was thought that all the wooden synagogues once dotting the landscape of Eastern Europe had been destroyed during Hitler's campaign to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth. Then a team from Hebrew University discovered six still standing.
In 1999, under the sponsorship of the Molly S. Fraiberg Judaica Collections at the Florida Atlantic University Library and others, a film crew headed by Albert Barry traveled to Lithuania and Latvia in search of the last standing shuls. They discovered four more, and produced a film, The Lost Wooden Synagogues of Eastern Europe, generating interest in their preservation.
These structures were architecturally unique, some reminiscent of Japanese pagodas, although it is clearly impossible that the builders of wooden synagogues had ever been anywhere near Japan. Multi-level roofs, balconies and galleries abounded. The interiors were often spectacular, baroque, with soaring ceilings and elaborate, handcrafted religious objects; the walls of the prayer halls were often covered with paintings, long gone now. Often, the most impressive synagogues were built in the smallest shtetls…villages. Their existence in these small, often impoverished communities of mud huts is an eloquent reminder of the values of the Jews of the shtetls. Wooden Synagogues, by Maria Piechotka is a definitive book on the subject, illustrated with photographs.
Several craftsmen, Albert Barry among them, have built meticulous models of some of these extraordinary structures. Moshe Verbin constructed models of wooden synagogues in Poland, now on permanent display in Yad Vashem, the Israeli Museum of the Holocaust. His book, Wooden Synagogues of Old Poland, documents the buildings.
The artist, Frank Stella was inspired by photographs of Eastern European Wooden Synagogues, and created a series of constructions based upon them that were exhibited in the Jewish Museum in New York City, in 1983. There is a catalogue available for this exhibit: Frank Stella: Polish wooden synagogues : constructions from the 1970s : February 10-May 1, 1983
The remaining wooden synagogues stand as a memorial to a way of life destroyed in the darkest of times, and have themselves have become a symbol of life itself; a reminder that the destruction was incomplete.
Julie Goldman
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