News, articles and information about Jewish art, architecture, and historic sites. This blog includes material to be posted on the website of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments (www.isjm.org).
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Sam Gruber to lecture about Synagogue Architecture in America at the Museum at Eldridge Street (Eldridge Street Synagogue) on Sunday, October 5, 2008
Sam Gruber to lecture about Synagogue Architecture in America at the Museum at Eldridge Street (Eldridge Street Synagogue) on Sunday, October 5, 2008
I will be in New York City to speak about Synagogue Architecture in America at the Museum at Eldridge Street (Eldridge Street Synagogue) on Sunday, October 5, 2008. The lectures is part of the NEH-funded series “Academic Angles” created to help the Museum place the story of the Eldridge Street Synagogue and its 20-year restoration into a broader cultural, religious and architectural context. My topic will combine two subjects - synagogue art & architecture and historic preservation. My subtitle is The Choices We Make: The Historic Preservation of American Synagogues. within the confines of a 50-minute lecture, I will describe the major trends of American synagogue architecture from the 18th through the early 20th centuries, comparing those buildings which survive with the historical record of what has been lost. I'll address the issues of how the often selective (and even accidental) nature of historic preservation in America shapes the popular narrative of American Jewish History just as much as history itself determines our decisions about what to save, and how to save it.
Many of these ideas have been refined in the past year as part of a project funded in part by a research grant from the James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation in memory of the late Richard Blinder. I am grateful to the foundation for its support.
Regardless of what I will say and how I say it, I encourage you to come if you have not seen the Eldridge Street Synagogue in its restored glory. The lecture will be in the sanctuary. I will also be showing many projected images. Come early to tour the building, which is open all day (Warning: during the lecture a screen will obscure a full view of the opulent Ark wall).
For a full schedule of events of the go the Museum website.
This blog provides news and opinion articles about Jewish art, architecture and historic sites - especially those where something new is happening. Developed in connection with news gathering for the International Survey of Jewish Monuments website (www.isjm.org), this blog highlights some of the most interesting Jewish sites around the world, and the most pressing issues affecting them.
Samuel D. Gruber I am a cultural heritage consultant involved in a wide variety of
documentation, research, preservation, planning, publication, exhibition
and education projects in America and abroad.
I was trained as a medievalist, architectural historian and
archaeologist, but for 20 years my special expertise has developed in
Jewish art, architecture and historic sites. My various blogs about Jewish monuments, Central New York and Public Art and Memory allow me to
clear my email and my desk, and to report on some of my travels, by
passing on to a broader public just some of the interesting and
compelling information from projects I am working on, or am following.
Feel free to contact me for more information on any of the topics
posted, or if you have a project of your own you would like to discuss.
Classic Reform, Classical Synagogues and the American South
This paper documents the spread of classical-style (Jewish) temples across the South and looks at the motives of selected patrons and architects to test the idea that the use of classicism for American, and especially Southern synagogue architecture was aesthetic and ideological, and an important mechanism for shaping Jewish identity.In the South, of course, there was already a precedent for“Classical Reform” architecture in the structure of Congregation Beth Elohim in Charleston, erected in 1841 in the form of a Greek Temple.These southern architectural roots also played a strong role in the revived popularity of classicism throughout the south – and beyond.
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