SHOAH DREAMS (detail, Tlomackie Synagogue)

Detail showing the Tlomackie synagogue - interior of the sanctuary. The Tlomackie synagogue was also called The Great Synagogue of Warsaw. Dedicated in 1878, the synagogue was outside the walls
of the Warsaw Ghetto.

After the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto during the famed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April - May 1943, the German forces blew up the synagogue and its world-famous library annex to "celebrate" the destruction of Jewish Warsaw and the murder of most of the Jews who had been imprisoned in it.

The German Army General in charge of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto's remaining 50,000 Jews still alive in January 1943 was SS Major General Juergen Stroop. Stroop was tried by a U.S. Military Court for
war crimes in Dachau, Germany in 1947 for executing captured American airmen. Eventually sent to Poland, he was tried, convicted of war crimes, and hung in 1951.

The bottom portion of the detail (below the circular curved dome of the synagogue ceiling as you see it in the detail) is drawn from a Jewish gravestone in Sieniawa, Poland. A photo of this gravestone appears in Time of Stones (Monika Krajewska, photographer, Interpress, Warsaw, 1983). The gravestone depicts a vase with flowers flanked by deer (?) antlers.