USA: Hurricane Beryl Blasts Historic Baytown, Texas Synagogue

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel, after Hurrican Beryl. Photo: Houston Jewish Voice.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel, Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023

Hurricane Beryl Blasts Historic Baytown, Texas Synagogue

by Samuel D. Gruber

Hurricane Beryl slammed into East Texas on July 8, hitting the Houston area hard. I am alarmed to see a picture of the historic Knesset Israel synagogue in Baytown, Texas stripped of most of its brick facade.  I wrote about this synagogue briefly in 2011 after it suffered limited damage in the destructive Hurricane Ike of 2008, and was then restored. The building has intrigued me for a long time. It is early work by noted Houston architect Lenard Gabert in 1930, best known to me for his remarkable design for Temple Emanu-El in Houston (1949) which is one the earliest fully-developed and expressive modern synagogues in America, and a building that has too long been ignored by architectural historians. Gabert's work evolved over the decades, and his post-World War II work was cutting edge.

We'll know more about the condition of the synagogue and what will be required to repair it in the coming days. But the congregation tells me that "if people wish to donate they may do so through Zelle. Our account is Congregation KNesseth Israel and the associated email address is ckibaytown@gmail.com."

I spent two days in Baytown last October, visiting my friends Joan and Reuben Linares. Joan is the president of the congregation, and president of the Texas Jewish Historical Society. The brick building has been listed as a Texas Historical Landmark since 1992 and Joan was instrumental in having K'nesset Israel listed on the National Register of Historic Places last December, with exhaustive research on its history and the history of Baytown's Jewish community by David Moore. David's exemplary NR nomination can be read in full here: https://atlas.thc.state.tx.us/NR/pdfs/100009949/100009949.pdf.  

I got to know the building close-up and personal which is a good thing now, given the recent damage. As far as I know the interior is still intact, though it is possible that there is water damage. Engineers are presently examining the structural integrity of the building after the storm. I include some of my my photos from last year. 

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel, Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

The synagogue is a mostly unadorned box which now, due to the hurricane damage seems revealed to be a mostly wood structure clad in yellow brick.  While to some it may appear - and I previously made this connection due to the profile of its roof - to be a poor man's version of elaborate synagogues on the coasts such as B'nai Jeshurun in New York and the Breed Street Shul in Los Angeles, it really is something different - at least on the outside.  It is certainly a low-cost building, but stylistically and functionally it is an efficient modern box.  An additional social hall was added later. The synagogue owes its stripped-down form to developments in Art Deco and Are Moderne style architecture, but also to industrial design. Inside, Gabert choose a more traditional and sedate Classical/Renaissanc style. This was probably more to the taste of the congregation. 

Just as Louis Kahn got his start designing simple modern boxes for Orthodox congregations in Philadelphia in the 1930s, I think we have to add Baytown to the broad narrative of American modern synagogue design. Certainly Baytown is an important step in Gabert's development. It is noteworthy that it was a Jewish architect willing to pursue simplicity. Gabert did not need to wait for the arrival of European refugee architects like Eric Mendelsohn, Frtiz Nathan, Norbert Troller, David Moed, et al to get to this point.

From Tri-Cities Tribune from July 29, 1933. Image included in the National Register nomination, 2023.

An illustrated local newspaper article from the  Tri-Cities Tribune from July 29, 1933 shows how radically different the "Jewish church" is from the buildings of neighboring congregations. K'nesset Israel was dedicated in 1930, just at the beginning of the Great Depression. We can only imagine what forms of modern synagogue architecture might have developed in America if most synagogue building the country had not come to almost complete halt at this time.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Facade Detail. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Facade Detail, Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023

The interior of the synagogue is simple and austere, with the bimah and ark given Renaissance/Colonial detailing, and simple stained glass designs for the large windows.  It would have looked more decorated before the dark woodwork was painted white - perhaps in a mistaken attempt to modernize the sanctuary's look. The high vaulted ceiling creates an airy space that is small enough for congregational intimacy but big enough to create a sense of grandeur, too.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Sanctuary, Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Interior before recent painting. Photo: Louis Davidson.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Bimah and ark, Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Sanctuary, Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Sanctuary, Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Sanctuary, Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Sanctuary, Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Sanctuary, Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Sanctuary, Phoo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

 

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Sanctuary, Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Stained glass window detail. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

My great uncle Moses Sumner was a founder of the synagogue in 1930,  and a supporter until his death in 1966. He and his brother Joe Susnitsky had a clothing store in Goose Creek (as that part of Baytown was then known) and my mother worked there as a store clerk for a summer job in the 1930s, soon after the synagogue was built (she later got her wedding suit there in 1946). That store has been torn down to make an urban park, but the former Goose Creek's main retail drag still exists - a slowly reviving strip that recalls old Jewish merchants, a bit of "the Last Picture Show, and 21st century art and tourism aspirations.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Yahrzeit (memorial) plaques for my great-uncles Mose Sumner and Joe Susnitsky. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2023.

Baytown, Texas. K'nesset Israel. Here is my uncle Mose Sumner helping to burn the mortgage. He is to the left of the menorah.

 

 

Rome: Holocaust (and other) Reminders Are Often Best When Unexpected

Rome, Italy. Stazione Tiburtina Binario 1, Memorial Plaques. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2024.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Holocaust (and other) Reminders Are Often Best When Unexpected:

Then Stop, Look, Remember, Think, Act!

by Samuel D. Gruber

Binario 1

I only passed through Rome this summer to change trains at Roma Tiburtina Station, but since my first train was cancelled, I had a little time to look around. My rule of Rome applied, that is, if you look at almost anything you will find something new. Even when jet-lagged and sleep deprived.

There along the wall of Binario (track) #1, where I disembarked from the train from the airport, were a series of inscribed plaques. One of these was in memory of the more than 1000 Jews who were deported to death camps via this station in October 1943.

 

Rome, Italy. Stazione Tiburtina Binario 1, Memorial Plaque for Deported Roman Jews.. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2024.

At the top are inscribed the shapes of two concentration camp badges – the six-pointed star for Jews, and the triangle with the letters “it” worn by Italian prisoners. Beneath is inscribed in large letters the dedicatory inscription that begins with a line from Primo Levi’s poem Se questo e un uomo (also the name of his memoir about survival in Auschwitz) - "Meditate che questo è stato” (Meditate that this was).

Here is a translation of Italian text of the plaque: 

"On October 16, 1943, more than a thousand Roman Jews, entire families, men, women and children, were torn from their homes, guilty only of existing. From this station October 18, enclosed in locked wagons, they were deported by the Nazis to the extermination camps. Sixteen men and only one woman returned. Their memory and that of all the Roman deportees, Jews, politicians, military, workers, will be a perennial warning because similar tragedies everywhere they must not be relived. Never again. / Municipality of Rome and Jewish Community of Rome, 16 October 2000."

 

Rome, Italy. Stazione Tiburtina Binario 1, Memorial Plaques. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2024.

Rome, Italy. Stazione Tiburtina Binario 1, Memorial Plaques for Anti-Fascist Railway Workers. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2024.

Other plaques commemorate the heroic actions of anti-fascist railroad workers, including some, like Michele Bolgia, who risked their lives to force opened train wagon doors to allow some of the Jewish prisoners to escape. These anti-fascist workers were all arrested, imprisoned and then executed at the Fosse Ardeatine.

I shouldn't have been surprised to find these plaques. For the last two years I've been documenting holocaust memorial monuments around the world for the International Holocaust Memorial Monument Database, and in Europe one of the most frequent public locations for these memorial monuments is at train stations from where Jews were deported. These include Milan, Prague, Thessaloniki, Berlin, L’viv, and another remarkable memorial I saw last year at Borgo San Dalmazzo in Piedmont.

 

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Tutti Potenziali Bersagli / All Potential Targets

Last summer, I was headed to another train station, Rome’s Ostiense Station at the Piazzale Ostiense, outside the Porta San Paolo. Even though I had been documenting several memorials in Rome that same week, I wasn't thinking about Holocaust monuments when I hurried to the train at this century-old station. On that hot day most on the train were headed to the beach, but I was going to the Roman port city of  Ostia Antica to see the ancient synagogue. But there, in front of the train station in a small Piazza, was an curious and eye-catching sculptural installation called 'Tutti Potenziali Bersagli' (All Potential Targets).

A close look (and some further research) let me know that this is a memorial for all victims of Fascists and Nazis, but also a call to anti-fascist vigilance and action. We see a row of chained silhouettes, with bound hands and targets on their backs. They are cut out of a large sheet of metal in which is inserted mirror glass, in which we see ourselves, so we know that we too, are – and can be – the target of fascism. The work was made in 1995. The threat seems even more real today. All the silhouettes wear triangular badges of the types required of different categories of concentration camp prisoners.

 

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Created by socially and politically engaged artist Emilio Leofreddi, the 1995 work was built by political activists and artists as a temporary installation on the 50th-anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. The monument who only received authorization the night before it was unveiled on April 25, 1995. It was only intended to be a 10-day installation, but it was never taken down. In 2007 it was included in Italy’s census of cultural heritage.

The location of the monument is significant. On September 8, 1943, Marshall Pietro Badoglio — who replaced Mussolini — announced that Italy negotiated an armistice with the Allies. The Germans immediately marched into the capital, prompting outbursts of resistance around the city, including three days of pitched battle between the Germans and Italian soldiers and armed civilians in the immediate area of the monument. It was this advance of the Germans that would soon lead to the round-ups and deportations of Rome's Jews.

Until 2018, All Potential Targets was the only Roman monument that also referenced and was dedicated to the homosexual victims of fascism. The inscription also mentions the victims of the fascist bombings and squadristi in the 1970s during the years of the strategy of tension [strategia della tensione]. It is not clear to me if the terrorism of the Red Brigades is included in this condemnation. I lived in Rome in the early 1970s and remember that period well.

 

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

It was hard to read the inscription, but here is my imperfect translation. Thanks to Shara Wasserman for some help with the last lines. Shara knew Leofreddi, and says he was a troubled soul, but a gentle and lovely person.

"To all the victims of fascist barbarism from the beginning of the twenties to today, from those of black shirts or double breasted black shirts, from the racial and political persecutions of the years of Mussolini and Hitler to the bombs on the trains and the piazze of the strategy of tension [strategia della tensione], of the murders of anti-fascist militants carried out in the 1970s by squadristi in and without uniforms, up to the assaults on social centers, nomad camps, and lynching of immigrants. To all free women and men transformed into target shooting silhouettes. To all those who opposed fascism and above all to those who will always oppose overt or disguised fascism. April 25, 1945-1995"

While not specifically a Holocaust memorial monument, we’ve included this in the Holocaust Memorial Monument database. Its specificity is a welcome contrast to the ambiguity and irony of so many German "counter-monuments" of the 1990s. These in time be included in the database, too.

For most passersby memorials and monuments are just background; they mean little to nothing.  Only when we stop to look are they animated, and do they have a purpose. So Stop, Look, Remember, Think, Act!

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets as background. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. Stazione Tiburtina Binario 1, Memorial Plaques as background. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2024