Our
documenting of synagogue art and architecture started innocently enough
on an April vacation to Italy. The trip was inspired by a course on
Renaissance art at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a lecture
by architect David Cassuto on synagogues in Italy.
Niche
for the tzedakah box,
Polná
synagogue (before restoration)
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After
visiting several cities, canvassing their synagogues, and enclaves of
art and tradition, we realized that we were on a new course. More of
Renaissance Italy could wait. These synagogue treasures
the legacy of scattered Jewish communities that dotted the hills
must be documented. It was then and there that we embarked on a project
that in five seasons would take us to 350 synagogues in eight countries
and inside almost all of them. Teachers
by training and inclination, we were under compulsion to record whatever
we found. Here was a story that had to be told. The work subsequently
engaged us, with the help of dozens of loyal volunteer assistants, over
seven additional years of research and writing, back at home in Jerusalem.
The
stares of townspeople on the street, in town after town, the curtains
discreetly pushed aside in windows on the square, were balanced by the
readiness of many older people to tell us at length of Jewish families
who had been their neighbors. They recited for us which businesses the
Jews had owned before the war. People living in previously Jewish-owned
houses had only good things to say about the former owners. It was uncanny,
incredible. In one town, when a municipal official noticed our horror
at the shambles of the synagogue building, he tried to comfort us, "Aber
wir haben einen schönen Friedhof" (But we have a beautiful
cemetery).
Synagogue entrance. The Hebrew inscription reads: Pithu li
Sha'arei Tzedek ("Open the gates of righteousness for
me").
Click
to view enlarged
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The
capitals, Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Vienna, Rome, Athens, Zagreb,
and Belgrade still have small, but viable Jewish communities. Their
major synagogues are documented and reasonably well known, but the town
and village hinterlands a vast reservoir
and graveyard of the Jewish past are mostly
unpublished. Our chosen task was to record existing synagogue buildings
that are relatively unknown. These are also of lesser restoration probability,
especially in peripheral locations reached by few travelers. The thought
was always with us as we drove along the country roads during the long
months of field activity that many of these buildings may disappear
in the next few decades. When they go, nearly all trace of the former
Jewish presence in these lands will vanish. Rummaging through the dusty
synagogues of vanished communities was a depressing experience. As we
walked the streets in these picturesque and tranquil precincts, we could
not help thinking of the missing Jews who had worshipped in buildings
that were now dwellings or storerooms.
Our
sources of information abroad ranged from local inhabitants, town historians,
municipal archivists, and museum personnel to the staffs of the few
extant Jewish communities. We photographed or photocopied documents
as we found them and supplemented the information from libraries in
Israel. On return trips to Europe, we prepared detailed questionnaires
in several local languages. The first part introduced us as researchers
and asked for help in finding an interpreter and in locating the synagogue.
The second part presented questions about the former Jewish community.
We taped the verbal replies. Then, thanks to a devoted crew of volunteers
in Israel (and even a few in Europe) for transcription and translation,
the contents of document or tape were made legible to us in English
or Hebrew. Information on local histories is hard to find. We supplemented
the scant material from encyclopedia and similar sources with local
publications we collected as we traveled. Compendia such as those of
Hugo Gold and both general and special remembrance books from Yad Vashem,
the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, in Jerusalem,
were especially useful. We gathered information from the database at
Beth Hatefutsoth, the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora at
Tel Aviv University, and also contributed to it.
Women's
galleries of the Neuschul in Trebic (the Czech Republic) before
and after restoration.
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Municipal
officials in European towns we visited were sometimes proud to give
us copies of plans for the forthcoming restoration of the local synagogue,
as in Trebíc, Moravia, Vrbové, and Liptovský Mikulá
in Slovakia. Most archivists were cooperative and eager to find historical
documents to show us. There were a few, however, who insisted that we
"Come back tomorrow," and on the morrow found other excuses
to send us away empty handed. In one small village we showed our credentials
to a housewife living in the tiny former synagogue. "Wir haben
das haus gekauft!" (We bought this house!) she fairly shouted in
distress and slammed the door shut. But such events were not typical.
The overwhelming impression is one of friendliness and a desire to help.
Several
archivists and municipal officials have maintained contact with us,
sending us occasional up-dated information. We were guests of the convivial
Mayor Jaroslav Kos of Rychnov nad Kneznou, Bohemia, in comfortable attic
quarters. He arranged a private tour of the Rychnov castle-museum and
obtained permission for us to photograph an illuminated eighteenth-century
megillah (Scroll of Esther). When he brought us to the town synagogue
he had never entered before, it was in use as a storeroom for a plumbing
supply company. Mayor Kos was shocked and embarrassed at the desecration.
He apologized for the state of affairs and promised to do what he could
to change matters. Before long, he organized money and restoration activity,
providing frequent photos of the work in progress until the synagogue
was dedicated as a Jewish museum in 1995.
Nearly
all the villages we visited had been empty of Jews since the Nazi deportations.
These locations attracted few foreign visitors. An exception was the
rare Jewish traveler, following an ancient, binding Jewish custom: to
locate the grave of a relative and there to recite the Kaddish
prayer. Strangers in the village square, we were obviously foreigners.
Our Jewish identity and the purpose of our visit soon became known to
passers-by, whom we approached for information about the synagogue.
After a moment of acquaintance came the ubiquitous question, "Was
your family from this town?"
Our
family? We had spent hundreds of hours searching for synagogues and
vestiges of the inscriptions in them, more hours scrambling through
vines and brambles for decipherable gravestone iconography, and days
poring over documents in arcane archives. Regardless of our immediate
forebears, we are an intrinsic part of the endless list of anonymous
Jews who populated these villages and towns. "Yes," we replied,
"our family came from this town."
Introduction
l Interview
l Dubrovnik
l Polná
l Rhodes