USA: ISJM to Survey Post-World War II American Synagogues

Syracuse, NY. Former Temple Beth El, built in the 1960s. Photos taken shortly before closure and sale to a church in 2007. The building has never been documented, but I was able to photograph it top to bottom before it was cleared of furniture and Judaica fitting. Photos: Samuel D. Gruber/ISJM

USA: ISJM to Survey Post-World War II American Synagogues
by Samuel D. Gruber (President, ISJM)

The International Survey of Jewish Monuments (ISJM) is launching a new documentation initiative aimed at gathering information about the architecture, art and condition of modern American synagogues built in the second half of the 20th century. The emphasis of the survey will be on buildings designed and erected between 1945 and 1975 as these are most at risk.

Research by ISJM members has shown that many of these buildings - even when designed by master architects - are poorly documented, and often threatened with radical alteration or complete demolition due to specific congregational factors and larger demographics shifts. Synagogues built in the 1950s and 1960s are regularly altered, expanded, sold and demolished due to expanding congregations, new liturgical and congregational expectations, changing tastes in style, and sometime high cost of maintaining deteriorated materials.

In the past decade alone synagogues designed by such as noted architects including Pietro Belluschi, Sidney Eisenshtat, Harrison & Abramovitz, Fritz Nathan, Percival Goodman. Walter Gropius, Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, Kivett & Myers, Eric Mendelsohn and Werner Seligmann have been significantly altered and in some cases even demolished. Scores of synagogues by lesser known local architects, such as Beth El in Syracusee pictured above, have shared this fate. Many others, like Adat Israel i Newport News, Va (below) are at risk.

Change is an inevitable process and ISJM's project is not intended to dictate how a congregation should use its property. The primary purpose of the survey is documentation, but documentation can lead to more informed decisions about future use. Also, since many of these buildings are now eligible or will soon be eligible for National Register listing, ISJM will encourage and assist congregations in this process when appropriate. We are pleased to note, for instance, that the NY Landmarks Conservancy has recently assisted the Kingsway Jewish Center in Brooklyn with NR nomination. Based on past success, it is hoped that interest by architectural historians and others through ISJM will also stimulate more interest in their buildings among congregants and also with local architecture and preservation organizations.

Newport, News, Virginia. Adat Israel is for sale. On a recent visit I was able to photograph the exterior, but could not get inside. One interesting feature is the room with windows to the right of the entrance in the photo immediately above. The room has no roof - it contains a permanent sukkah frame. Photos: Samuel D. Gruber/ISJM Sept 2009.

Plans call for an organizing committee of volunteers for this project, each to be responsible for collating inventories and organizing documentation based on location. Volunteers in New York, Florida, Illinois and Minnesota have already responded.

ISJM also welcomes informative and learned discussion on related issues of architects, patronage, planning, design, materials, construction, use and re-use of modern synagogues and all modern religious buildings. ISJM will aslo assist members with organizing lectures, seminars and conerence sessions on these topics.

With the exception of a few iconic buildings by a few noted architects (i.e. Wright's Unity Temple and Beth Sholom Synagogue; Kahn's First Unitarian Church and unbuilt Mikveh Israel Synagogue; Belluschi's sacred spaces), religious architecture in American mostly receives short shrift in the literature of architectural history.

If you are interested in participating as an organizer, documentarian, sponsor or organizational partner please contact me directly at samuelgruber@gmail.com.

ISJM is especially eager to hear from architects and builders (or their descendents) to learn about synagogues they have designed, and to discuss with them the eventual disposition of their papers, drawings and other documentation concerning such projects.

Publication: New Book about Louis Kahn and Philadelphia's Mikveh Israel

Publication: New Book about Louis Kahn and Philadelphia's Mikveh Israel


I review Susan Solomon's new book, Louis I. Kahn’s Jewish Architecture: Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury American Synagogue in today's edition of Tablet Magazine.

Click here to read the review Sacred Space: Louis Kahn and the architecture of quiet reverence.

The book is about more than Kahn. It contains several informative chapters on issues of ideology, aesthetics and identity in post-World War II American synagogue design.

USA: New Synagogue by Alfred Jacoby dedicated in Park City, Utah

USA: New Synagogue by Alfred Jacoby dedicated in Park City, Utah

by Samuel D. Gruber

[n.b. the following is based on many sources, but NOT a personal visit to the new synagogue. Friends have described it and shown me pictures, I hope to visit when the opportunity arises]

German-Jewish Architect Alfred Jacoby has built his first synagogue in the United States, an elegant structure in the ski-resort town of Park City, Utah, home of the U.S. Ski team and the Sundance Film Festival. Temple Har Shalom was dedicated on June 27, 2008. Jacoby is the most prominent post-war synagogue architect in Germany. He achieved notice in America in 2002 at the time of a traveling exhibition of his work, which included a stop at the University of Utah. In the past two decades has designed synagogues in Darmstadt (1988), Heidelberg (1994), Aachen (1996), Offenbach (1998), Kassel (2000), and Chemnitz (2002).

Jacoby, a professor and director at the Dessau Institute of Architecture, has a reputation as a synagogue designer in Germany today similar to Percival Goodman’s in America in the 1950s to 1970s – he’s the go-to guy for new community-based synagogues (as opposed to the more politically-motivated monumental “show” synagogues, like those in Dresden and Munich. Jacoby’s designs are always interesting and sometimes innovative, but they are also always easy to understand and mostly comfortable to use. He is known as a synagogue architect with whom communities can work. Jacoby’s buildings are known for their use of contemporary architectural forms and materials, but unlike Goodman, until now his designs are in adherence to traditional Orthodox spatial and liturgical requirements. But though Jacoby creates synagogues that are nominally Orthodox, most congregants are Russian-Jewish immigrants not well trained in traditional Judaism, let alone the rudiments of Orthodox worship. His buildings, therefore, support a comfortable Orthodoxy that emphasizes community building as much as punctilious prayer. While Temple Har Shalom is his first design for a Reform congregation, his aesthetic is easily adapted in this new situation.

Temple Har Shalom invited a large number of distinguished and up-and-coming architects to submit RFP’s for the synagogue project, and after review chose Jacoby over several more unconventional architects. Jacoby’s designs in general, and at Park City, tend to be accessible, elegant and non-confrontational. They combine some of the best (and most tranquil) qualities of rationalism and simple geometry (Jacoby studied with Aldo Rossi in Zurich in the 1970s), with an expressive use of light that derives in large part from American modern synagogues designed by Eric Mendelsohn and Percival Goodman during the post-War period. Jacoby likes to mix up materials, and is especially fond of dark wood veneers, white walls and occasionally limestone accents. At Temple Har Shalom, as in Jacoby’s recent work in Kassel and Chemnitz, there is an abundance of wood, recalling perhaps, some of the work of Alvar Aalto and synagogues of Pietro Belluschi. The complex also has a vestibule/common room with a fireplace set in a brick wall, perhaps a nod to a ski lodge aesthetic.

In many of his previous synagogues Jacoby has shown a penchant for circular or elliptical forms (Aachen, Heidelberg, Chemnitz), something he avoids at Park City, where the sanctuary has a more traditional rectangular plan, and can be expanded. Until now, Jacoby's best previous designs have mostly been for city synagogues – where they often help to heal the urban form, carefully weaving the new architectural forms, spaces and processionals into older urban fabric. At Park City he works to integrate the building to the striking landscape. Following popular trends in American synagogue design (which go back to the 1960s), Jacoby opens up the building to the landscape with large floor-to-ceiling windows that reveal big vistas from two floors. The sanctuary, however, remains a more sheltered space, its large east wall windows filled with stained glass designed by Jun Kaneko of Omaha, Nebraska. Overhead, a wood ceiling, something like a stretched out sine wave, undulates upward to its high point above the Ark (this is almost the reverse arrangement used by Mendelsohn at B’nai Amoona in St. Louis). Jacoby likens the ceiling profile to that of the nearby mountains. More than any element it energizes the space.

Not everything about Temple Har Shalom is new. The congregation owns a Torah scroll, now restored and made kosher, that was once in Zamosc, Poland, and managed to survive the Holocaust. Coincidentally, the 17^th-century synagogue in Zamosc also survived, and after years of use as a library, is now receiving the restoration it deserves (more on that important building and project another time)..

“Jewish synagogue to be dedicated in Park City tonight”
June 27th, 2008 (with photos)
http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=3635541

Temple Har Shalom website

On Alfred Jacoby see: In Einem Neuen Geiste / In a New Spirit: The Synagogues of Alfred Jacoby (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Architektur Museum – Aktuelle Galarie, 2002).