USA: The Modern Synagogues of Sheldon Leavitt

Architect Sheldon, Leavitt, Portsmouth, Virgnia (2009). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber

USA: The Synagogues of Sheldon Leavitt, P.E., AIA
by Samuel D. Gruber

At a recent lecture that I gave I met architect Sheldon Leavitt, P.E., AIA, who I had previously known only as a name - the architect of record of Temple Oheb Shalom in Baltimore, designed and built 50 years ago (1956-60),and for which Walter Gropius was consulting architect. Leavitt told me something about the circumstances through which Gropius was engaged...and it was instructive for learning the reality of how modern synagogue architecture was sometimes developed - and still is.

Baltimore, Maryland. Temple Oheb Shalom (1956-60), Sheldon Leavitt, architect and Walter Gropius, consulting architect. Photo: Paul Rocheleau.

Temple Oheb Shalom was set to build a new suburban home and Leavitt was engaged, but it was suggested - or requested - that he try to engage someone with a bigger reputation to consult to help fund raising. Aesthetics had nothing to do with it. Leavitt suggested Gropius, with whom he had recently worked on a project and the rest is history. Leavitt visited Cambridge, where Gropius was at Harvard, and the two spent time working on designs. In the end the synagogue features and the functional aspects of the building were probably Leavitt's, since he knew the congregation and had already designed several other synagogues. The distinctive design features, however, especially four great barrel vaults that transverse the main block of the sanctuary, as well as the sanctuary floor that sloped up to the bimah; were Gropius's ideas. After a half century - and when asked on the spot - Leavitt couldn't quite recall. But I hope to interview him sometime soon to get more on this story, and to learn more of the collaborative process, but also more about his work on at least seven other synagogues which he told me about. All of these were built in the 1950s around the time of Oheb Shalom. Since that time his career took him in other directions - especially industrial, commercial, high-rise residential design.

At that time Leavitt was almost as prolific a synagogue builder as Percival Goodman, another young American-born Jewish architect who championed modernism. Leavitt, much more than Goodman, leaned toward a functionalism in his work which demonstrated his training as an engineer. Mr. Leavitt holds a BSCE degree with high honors from the University of Illinois.

Here is a working list of Leavitt synagogues. I have been able to pull together photos for some of them. His Gromley Chesed Synagogue in Portsmouth (1954), which I have not had a chance to visit, appears to be an especially handsome early modern structure.

All need to be visited, described and fully photographed, and I expect this will be done as part of ISJM's modern American synagogue documentation project. Architectural historic Al Willis has already volunteered to document those synagogues in the Virgina Tiderwater region.

Portsmouth, Virginia. Gromley Chesed (1954), Sheldon Leavitt, arch. Photos courtesy of Julian H. Preisler.

Norfolk, Virginia. Temple Israel. Sheldon Leavitt, arch. (1953). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber, 2009.

Cincinnati, Ohio. Former (?) Ohav Sholom Synagogue. Sheldon Leavitt, Arch. (1957).
Photos courtesy of Julian H. Preisler.

Other synagogues are:

Jacksonville Hebrew Congregation, 1955, Jacksonville, NC

Beth Israel Synagogue, (?) 1957, Roanoke, VA

Rodef Sholom Social Temple, 1957, Hampton-Warwick, VA

Adath Jeshurun Synagogue, 1958, Hampton, VA (subsequently redesigned)

Most of Leavitt's career has been as an accomplished engineer. Indeed, he was a Founding Fellow of the National Academy of Forensic Engineers, and is a Life Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Fellow of the Architectural Engineering Institute of the ASCE, He founded Leavitt Associates in 1953, where he is still engaged, and where his son is a partner.

USA: Syracuse University Library has acquired the personal papers of architect Morris Lapidus

Miami Beach, Fl. Temple Menorah, 1962. Morris Lapidus, arch. From D. Desilets, Morris Lapidus: The Architecture of Joy (New York: Rizzoli, 2010), 167. This photo is now part of the Lapidus Collection at Syracuse University.

USA: Syracuse University Library has acquired the personal papers of architect Morris Lapidus.

Syracuse University Library has acquired the personal papers of the flamboyant and trend-setting architect Morris Lapidus (1902-2001). Although clearly an architectural original, and a man who worked and pleased a varied clientele, Lapidus can also has serious credentials as a Jewish architect. He designed several synagogues, and his Miami architecture was especially in tune with a unique phase of American Jewish leisure life.

The Lapidus papers join other collections at the Syracuse University Library Special Collections and Research Center (SCRC) of the other leading modern American architects who also happened to design synagogues, including Marcel Breuer, Pietro Belluschi, Minoru Yamasaki and Werner Seligmann.

Pikesville, MD. Temple Beth Tfiloh, 1961. Morris Lapidus, arch. From D. Desilets, Morris Lapidus: The Architecture of Joy (New York: Rizzoli, 2010), 167.

Though his interior design and hotels are better known, Lapidus's synagogues deserve study, if only to see have they compare with contemporary work. His Temple Menorah in Miami Beach, for instance, bears at least a superficial resemblance to Gropius and Leavitt's Oheb Shalom in Baltimore, built just about the same time. I'm sorry I did not include any of Lapidus's work when I published my American Synagogues (Rizzoli) book in 2003.

Baltimore, MD. Oheb Shalom. Walter Gropius and Sheldon Leavitt, architects. Photo: Paul Rocheleau (2002).

Miami Beach, Fl. Temple Menorah, 1962. Morris Lapidus, arch. Photo: Julian H. Preisler.

According to the release from the Syracuse University Library:

Lapidus, who died in 2001, is perhaps best known for hotels like the Fontainebleau, Americana, and Eden Roc in Miami Beach, Fla., buildings which embodied the growth of leisure in American life during the 1950s and 1960s. The Fontainebleau has served as a backdrop for variety of iconic scenes in American film, including the James Bond thriller "Goldfinger" (1964). Most of Lapidus' buildings exhibited a mélange of historical styles--French provincial, Italian and Baroque--and anticipated the post-modernism of later architects.

Lapidus was born in Odessa, Russia, in 1902, but his family immigrated to the United States soon thereafter. As a wide-eyed youth, he marveled at the splendor of Coney Island and he would later impart a similar spirit of excess to his work as an architect. That spirit would place him at odds with his function-minded modernist peers. However, contrary to the editor's choice of title for his 1996 autobiography, "Too Much is Never Enough," Lapidus was interested less in hedonism than he was in a "quest for emotion and motion in architecture."

Frustrated by his sometimes antagonistic relationship with the architectural establishment, Lapidus destroyed many of his firm's records when he retired in 1984. However, he retained a core collection of especially valuable papers that he entrusted to his last collaborator and confidant, architect Deborah Desilets. The archive includes a large collection of photographs dating to the 1920s, conceptual drawings, manuscript drafts of his written works and correspondence with his long-time friend, mystery writer Ellery Queen.

Desilets approached Syracuse, which has held a small Lapidus collection since 1967, and a gift of the material was finalized in December. Speaking on her decision to place the archive with Syracuse, Desilets says, "The archive is an extremely important missing link in the discourse on Lapidus' influence on 20th-century architecture. I am thrilled to place it in such a distinguished research institution where it will be available for use by generations of students and scholars."

In Syracuse's Special Collections Research Center, the Lapidus archive will reside in one of the most important mid-century modern collections in the country. Among the other architects represented are Marcel Breuer, William Lescaze and Richard Neutra, as well as designers like Russel Wright and Walter Dorwin Teague.

Syracuse School of Architecture faculty member Jon Yoder offered this assessment of the Lapidus archive's value for teaching and research: "The recent proliferation of architect-designed boutique hotels, coupled with the pervasive disciplinary focus on architectural effects suggests that Lapidus was indeed one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. This acquisition of his personal archive comes as welcome news to designers and scholars who are finally beginning to reassess the lavish contributions of this much-maligned architect across a surprisingly broad spectrum of design disciplines."

For more information, contact Sean Quimby, senior director of Special Collections, at 315-443-9759 or smquimby@syr.edu.

USA: Louise Nevelson's The White Flame of the Six Million at Temple Beth El, Great Neck

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary, Armand Bartos & Associates, architects, 1970. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

USA: Louise Nevelson's The White Flame of the Six Million at Temple Beth El, Great Neck
by Samuel D. Gruber

Last October I gave a lecture at Temple Isaiah in Great Neck, New York, and  used the occasion to revisit Great Neck's Temple Beth El, which I had not seen since publishing my American Synagogues book in 2003. At that time I was more interested in the architecture of the 1970 building designed by Armand Bartos & Associates, than the rich collection of Jewish art and memorials which adorn the many spaces of the synagogue, including the 1930s Tudor-style prayer hall with an ark with artwork by Ilya Schor, a small gallery space, hallways, vestibules, and the very large 2-story 1970 sanctuary.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary 1930s, now chapel. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary 1930s, now chapel. Ark doors by Ilya Schor. Photo:

Kampf, Contemporary Synagogue Art: Developments in the United States, 1945-1965.  (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), 205.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Armand Bartos & Associates, architects, 1970. Photo: Architectural Record Religious Buildings (1979).

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary, Armand Bartos & Associates, architects, 1970. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

On this visit, guided by Temple Executive Director Stuart Botwinick and congregant and good friend Rebecca Anderson Wotman, we looked at the art more closely, and especially the great wood work by the late Louise Nevelson titled The White Flame of the Six Million which spreads across the back of the sanctuary bimah. The work turns 50 this year. It was commissioned as a Holocaust Memorial and as the Torah Ark of the synagogue, a rare combination, and should be better known as an early example of synagogal Holocaust commemorative art.

Naming a work gives it meaning. Without its title and the ceremonies which consequently acknowledge the name, this work might "just" be considered an abstract artwork, or a decorative screen creating focus in the otherwise austere sanctuary space. But by naming the "White Flame," the work now hovers on the boundary of abstraction (familiar from many Holocaust memorials) and symbolic form.

While Nevelson, through the 1950s and 1960s, had been creating larger and larger sculptural works and especially developing her signature approach to constructing wooden walls, such works were made as purely expressive exercises. Some had fanciful titles, but she never attempted to load them with overt meaning. Only a few other works, including two referencing the Holocaust, carried any level of specificity. 

The first, titled Homage to Six Million I, was made in 1964, and consists of two attached curved walls, each comprised of a grid of boxes in which no two boxes and their contents are alike. Though all painted black, they are seen to represent that the "6,000,000" are a collective - but a collective of individuals. A second version, Homage to 6,000,000 II, was also made in 1964. Also of black-painted wood boxes, this is arranged more like a stepped pyramid, and all the box compartments are of different sizes.

Louise Nevelson. Homage to 6,000,000 (1964). Formerly Collection Brown University, Providence Rhode Island, now Osaka City Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Nevelson Wood Sculptures (1973).

Louise Nevelson. Homage to 6,000,000 (1964). Formerly Collection Brown University, Providence Rhode Island, now Osaka City Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Nevelson Wood Sculptures (1973).

Louise Nevelson, homage to 6,000,000 II, 1964. The Israel Musuem. Photo: The Israel Museum in Rapaport, ed. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (Jewish Museum, 2007), 23.

Martin Friedman, writing in Nevelson Wood Sculptures, a catalog of a Nevelson sculpture exhibit in 1973 organized by the Walker:

Nevelson's sculpture is about the revelation of daily existence. She is not a literary or historically minded person, nor is she interested in creating descriptive or symbolic forms. Her work is a distillation of impressions and experiences of life and embodies the forms and energies that surround us. In her art, these qualities are translated to an abstract level, with occasional clues in the form of recognizable objects, to a reality we all share.

Friedman's words "with occasional clues in the form of recognizable objects, to a reality we all share" might apply to The White Flame of the Six Million, because in the work the cut wood pieces are assembled in patterns that do recall flames. This work is something of a transition for Nevelson in that it does not use found pieces of wood but instead is entirely constructed of newly shaped and sawn pieces (much like Matisse’s paper cut collages). But the wall is not solid, it is pierced to give alternating strips of solid and void; of white paint and dark shadow. It can look like flickering flames, and both the white silhouettes and shapes of the shadowy voids can appear wraith-like, as if wispy ghosts of the crematoria-burned dead are still present as wisps of spirit in supplication; shadow figures seeking prayers and remembrance, demonstrating their past European lives to the still-present and prosperous American congregation.

Louise Nevelson, The White Flame of the Six Million. Model, 22.5 x 74 inches, 1970. Private Collection. Photo: Ellen Page Wilson, in Rapaport, ed. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (Jewish Museum, 2007), 152.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Rome, Italy. Villa Torlonia Catacomb. Wall painting in cubiculum. The flames here might refer to eternal life after death. Photo: ISJM.

Yehuda Bacon. In Memory of the Czech Transport to the Gas Chambers. 1945. Charcoal on paper. Yad Vashem Art Museum Collection, Jerusalem.Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

David Olere, Extermination of the Jewish People, 1946. Ghetto Fighters House, Israel. Photo: http://fcit.usf.edu/Holocaust/gallery2/D96.htm.

The reality of flames is part of the horror of the Holocaust, as we know that so many people, and so many synagogues and holy objects were burned to nothing. The immediacy of fire has appealed to artists grappling with how to represent Holocaust suffering and destruction. And artists have also looked to fire's smoke. The extinguished flame is a sign of final death, but also one might find something of the face and spirit of the dead in the smoke, as did the very young Yehuda Bacon, in his portrait remembrance of his father, whose face he drew rising above the crematorium.

Showing the flame, too, can represent hope. In Jewish tradition from the funerary art of the Roman catacombs to graphic art of the pogrom-plagued Pale of Settlement, the light of the Temple menorah and sabbath candles has been used to suggest the constancy of the Jewish people, their resilience and revival, and God's covenant.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson, Torah mantles designed by Ina Golub. Photo:Paul Rocheleau, 2002.

Architecturally, Nevelson's memorial works as a bimah backdrop and wide screen that enlivens the wide otherwise blank wall. The middle section, not quite centered, bulges out with accent, and this is the functional Holy Ark, the repository of the Torah scrolls. The brightly colored mantles designed by Ina Golub are the only accent of color in the otherwise understated sanctuary. I don't know if Golub's colors were anticipated by either architect Bartos or sculptor Nevelson, or whether they were added to the sanctuary as an antidote of color.

There are many examples of such screens in mid-century modern synagogues, such as in the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation (1948), designed by Percival Goodman; the Park Synagogue in Cleveland (1953) designed by Erich Mendelsohn; Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel in Port Chester, New York (1956), designed by Philip Johnson, where sculptor Ibram Lassaw created a wire sculpture screen that is now owned by the Jewish Museum in New York;  Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Seattle (1960), designed by Detlie and Peck with B. Marcus Pritica; Temple Oheb shalom in Baltimore, Maryland (1960), designed by Walter Gropius and Sheldon Leavitt; and the chapel at Temple B'rith Kodesh in Rochester, New York (1962), designed by Pietro Belluschi with a bimah/ark by Richard Filipowski.

Port Chester, NY, Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel, Philip Johnson, architect, 1956. Photo:

Kampf, Contemporary Synagogue Art: Developments in the United States, 1945-1965.  (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966),195.

Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore Hebrew Congregation (1948-1953).

Cleveland, Ohio. Park Synagogue. Eric Mendelsohn, arch., 1948-1953. Photo: Paul Rocheleau, 2002.

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

Baltimore, Maryland. Temple Oheb Shalom. Walter Gropius and Sheldon Leavitt, architects, 1960. Photo: Paul Rocheleau, 2002.

Rochester, New York. Temple Brith Kodesh, chapel. Pietro Belluschi, architect with a bimah/ark by Richard Filipowski, 1962.

In 1970 Louise Nevelson was recognized as one of the greatest living American artists, and her work in wood and metal influenced and dominated contemporary trends in sculpture. Her work developed out of surrealism and abstraction in the 1930s and 1940s, but was able to respond and adapt to - as well as push and shape - developments in 1950s and 1960s including pattern and abstract design and the rise of minimalism and installation art.

Nevelson was born in Ukraine and came to America as a small child, settling with her family in Rockland, Maine. Throughout her life she constructed her autobiography in similar ways to her sculpture, by compartmentalizing, rearranging and obscuring the main narrative, and building structure from scavenged and modeled pieces arranged, attached, and repeated in accordance to her particular aesthetic. All these details were first painted black, and then sometime beginning in the early 1960s she also made works in white - white-washed if you will. For Nevelson, truth was found not in precise facts, but in the real or fictive arrangement of fragments to create an experience or tell a story.

Thus, knowing her early life, and discerning any role of Judaism and impact of being Jewish on her art is hard to discern. But biographers Michael Stanislawski, Laurie Wilson, and others make it clear that the impact of her outsider immigrant-foreigner status in Rockland status and the widespread and persistent antisemitism in early-20th century Maine was strong. In 1925, just four years after Louis Berliawsky, soon-to-be Nevelson left, the Ku Klux Klan had over 150,000 members in Maine. That was, according to Laurie Wilson, more than in any other state at the time. The KKK in Maine was there to protect the white Protestant make-up of the state against foreigners - especially Catholics and Jews. The rise of the KKK in the Jim Crow South was paralleled by its rise in the anti-immigrant Northeast and Midwest. Publicly, Nevelson spoke of the more positive influences of Rockland and Maine - timber, ship building and ornate wooden houses with stick style porches and rooftop captain's walk.

Throughout Nevelson's long career her work was uniquely recognizable as hers, and hers alone. Yet decade by decade Nevelson kept pushing boundaries and creating new types, forms, and audience relations for her work. In the 1960s her work became increasingly monumental, first as fragments, then as walls, and then entire environments. She began to be commissioned to create pubic art. Her large wall sculpture for Temple Beth El is a good and early example, but there were others that were made with Jewish content or for Jewish context.

Louise Nevelson. New Continent, 1962. St. Louis Art Museum.
Photo: Nevelson Wood Sculptures (1973).

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Three years after her work in Great Neck, Nevelson created a twenty-foot-high and-wide Cor-ten steel sculpture installed in 1973 outside Boston's Temple Israel, which was expanded by The Architects Collaborative, with which the idea of the Nevelson installation apparently originated. The AC thought the Nevelson piece would "establish an appropri­ate frame for the formal approach to the Temple and a counterbalance to the strength of the existing portico.”

The work, titled Sky Covenant, with its grid of twenty-five boxes more closely resembles some of Nevelson's black-painted wooden walls of the 1960s than the Temple Beth El memorial. It is very much part of a metal sculpture series Atmosphere and Environment which she was making in the early 1970s. But like the painted wood Beth El memorial wall, these work are transparent; there are spaces that allow the eye and hand to penetrate the grid. In this, Sky Covenant is as much a screen as a wall. It was described by Temple Israel's Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn as symbolic of the universe - perhaps a bit of rabbinic hyperbole - and there is no indication one way or the other that this interpretation or intent was Nevelson's.

Louise Nevelson. Big Black, 1963. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2017.

Boston, Massachusetts. Temple Israel. Sky Covenent by Louis Nevelson, 1973. Photo: Temple Israel in Rapaport, ed. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (Jewish Museum, 2007), p. 61.

Today, the sanctuary of Beth El in Great Neck is not used every week - the congregation prefers the smaller 1932 chapel, with its wood ceiling and stained glass windows. But the 1970 sanctuary is used on major holidays, for important life cycle events, and for concerts and memorial services. The Nevelson sculpture is still an important part of this space but it may be that after fifty years it is often taken for granted. Now, as it celebrates its Golden Anniversary, it seems worth taking another look. How does abstraction lead to reaction? Can form lead to contemplation or serve as mediation to meditation? Or are sensibilities in the 21st century too demanding, requiring action over abstraction; distraction over contemplation?

USA: Seattle's De Hirsch Sinai, a Suburban-style Mountain, Cave and Tent for an Urban Congregation

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016

USA: Seattle's De Hirsch Sinai, a Suburban-style Mountain, Cave and Tent for an Urban Congregation
by Samuel D. Gruber 

In the past few weeks I've visited two very different - and very important - mid-century modern synagogue "mountains": Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Temple de Hirsch Sinai in Seattle, for which B. Marcus Pritica was consulting architect. Wright's work is certainly more known than that Pritica's. In Seattle, I only walked past the Temple exterior, but I had a good look inside a few years ago. What follows is a discussion of that remarkable - but little known - mid-century synagogue  based on my 2016 visit. I'll follow up soon with an account of my top to bottom tour of Wright's Beth Sholom.

I recently wrote about some surviving former synagogue buildings in Seattle's' Yesler Way neighborhood. Not far away in, in the Capitol Hill Neighborhood stands the still extant and very active Temple De Hirsch Sinai, the city's largest synagogue, a Reform Temple founded in 1899 and today the largest Reform Congregation in the Pacific Northwest. The current sanctuary at 16th Avenue and Pike Street, adjacent to a 1920 buildings and continuous to the lot of the demolished 1908 sanctuary, was opened in 1960. At the time it was still a bold work of modernism in Seattle, and even today the structure is markedly different than most religious buildings. 

Two years ago, I wrote about the commemorative plaza built on the site of the congregation's 1908 building, which was demolished in 1993 after efforts to preserve it as a concert hall failed. By that time the new Temple DeHirsch sanctuary a mid-century modernist mountain, had already been standing for more than thirty years, dominating the other side of the same continuous synagogue property.

Paradoxically, preference for mid-century modernism was already on the wane when the congregation took down the 1908 structure. Increasingly, congregation were craving many of the older flourishes that that building had provided – smaller worship space, natural light, variation in wall texture and color, and visual stimulation. Taste change with every generation. The success for post-modernism in architecture and the nascent historic preservation movement shifted architectural focus in the 1990s. In Seattle the city was working hard to revive Pioneer Square, the oldest extant part of the city.

Now, thirty years later, tastes have changed again, and the mid-century modernism of De Hirsh Sinai is back in vogue – at least in part (I deciate this post to my colleagues on the Synagogue Moderne Facebook Group). Younger generations seem to like the style – in least in theory. But a smaller and more dispersed younger Jewish population is not affiliating with these mega-temples as they once were, so the future of most are jeopardy.  This is part due to demographics and location. Younger Jews are leaving the suburbs for the cities.
DeHirsch Sinai is something of an anomaly. Its design is entirely in keeping with the big mid-century Temples of the suburbs, but it is entirely urban in location. Not only that, it is urban in what may be the most popular re-location city in America. Though young people raised in Seattle may go elsewhere, there is a constant stream of newcomers, and some at least of these young tech titans are Jewish. Conventional wisdom has it that young single people do not affiliate much with synagogues, but they do when then marry have children. I don’t know what the trend is at DeHirsch Sinai, but when I toured the place with a young rabbi a few years ago, he seemed excited about the level of younger participation and the Temple had an active program of outreach based in the city, and also in their affiliated facility in Bellevue.

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Ceiling. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

John Detlie (1908-2005) and Raymond Peck were the architects of record for the new Temple, and B. Marcus Pritica (1889-1971) was consulting architect. Given his long history as a thetaer designer, it is likely that Pritica gave the general concept, and the Detlie and Peck worked out the details. Pritica had designed a sparkling mosiac Ark for his first synagogue (Bikur Cholim) way back in 1914, and had specialized in theater design for decades. But Detlie had been a art director and set designer for MGM from 1937 to 1942 - so it is hard to know who designed the  monumental and dazzlingly theatrical Ark and other interior decoration.

Like many large synagogues of this period, the sanctuary looks best when ti is empty (totally awesome!) or entirely filled. A small crowd just makes the space loom larger, sucking the humanity out of religious worship. For this reason many congregations have added large chapels to their more monumental sanctuaries - in order to create more intimate spaces for small crowds and varied purposes. But the central location, the large enveloping tent-like space comes alive when filled. In the last year especially, the sanctuary became a place of community gathering, refuge, mourning and commemoration after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting last October, when the sanctuary and plaza outside were filled and the meaning of a synagogue as a Beit-haKnesset - a place of gathering - was fulfilled.

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai. Vigil on October 19, 2018, after shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh. Photo: Rich Smith.

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai. Vigil on October 19, 2018, after shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh. Photo: Alex Garland/CHS.

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai. Vigil on October 19, 2018, after shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh. Photo: KOMO.

The Temple was very much a building of its time. The architects were either inspired by or competing with (or both) Frank Lloyd Wright's Temple Beth Shalom in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, which opened in 1959. Wright's building has been called a new Mount Sinai (albeit in glass and plastic). Pritica, Detlie and Peck had to make a new mountain - and they succeeded with a design in which the new sanctuary looks a bit like Devil's Tower on the outside, but also surely recalls Mount Sinai - and perhaps those peaks of more close-by-Seattle mountains: Ranier and Baker. Unlike Wright's Temple, however, which is a mountain of light, Temple De Hirsch Sinai is a mountain on the outside, but something of a cave within. The only natural light is filtered through think stained glass windows at ground level. This experience is entirely insular. Once in the sanctuary the rest of the world does not exist. Wright through his use of glass and plastic created a light-filled, space, and Pritica, Detlie and Peck created a space apart this world, where attention in the sanctuary was entirely internalized. Wright had just died at age 94 when Beth Sholom was completed. Both Wright and Pritica had long successful careers - and Wright's achievement- and the praise it garnered - might have been especially meaningful to the 71-year-old Pritica.

Elkins Park, PA. Temple Beth Sholom. Frank Lloyd Wright, architect, 1953-1959. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019

Seattle, Washington. Mount Ranier seen from Smith tower. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016

Prtiica seems to be given credit for the main design, but I do not know the details of the process. Prtiica had a long career in theater design and had built synagogues in Seattle as early as 1915. But Detlie also had an impressive career that included a stint as a Hollywood art director, so it is likely that the two joined forces on the interior design.

The building represented a clear break from the past when it was built and epitomized the architectural preferences of the late 1950s and 1960s, when big ahistorical, abstract, and/or symbolic forms were deemed most appropriate for new synagogue design. Large awesome spaces – often tent-like in form – took precedence of intimate and highly detailed spaces.

The structure in the Temple De Hirsch Sinai sanctuary brings to mind a the framework of a tent, with the skin wrapped around. The tent was a common motif at the time - recalling the Mishkhan in the the desert and the basic nomadic nature of Diaspora Judaism - something clearly evident in Seattle where Judaism had pushed to the final American frontier on the short of the Pacific Ocean. The Biblical tent could not be further from the historicist styles of Old- World Europe. Gavriel Rosenfeld and others have written that the popularity of modernism must have some roots in the trauma of the Holocaust, and this is certainly true, but I have also often maintained that the main trends of American synagogue modernism already have architectural roots in the Byzantine style, Art Deco, and proto-modernist designs of the inter-war period. As far as the interior structure of De Hrish Sinai, it may have been influence by the 1957 publication of Wooden Synagogues, or it might be part of the architectural Zeitgeist, since Seattle-based architect Pietro Belluschi uses similar forms in some of his churches and synagogues, perhaps most dramatically in Brith Kodeshin Rochester, New York, not complected until 1963.

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Ceiling. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

Rochester, NY. Temple B'rith Kodesh. Pietro Belluschi, architect, 1963. Photo: Paul Rocheleau, 2020.

This was a period of delight in new technologies and cheap energy. Enclosed interiors depended almost entirely on artificial light, sound amplification through microphones and speaker systems, and substantial mechanical assistance for ventilation, heating and cooling. Natural light only filters in to the sanctum from the ground level, where a ring stained glass windows and decorative metal grates carry the superstructure. The idea may come from Erich Mendelsohn's Park Synagogue in Cleveland dedicated in 1953, but the effect is quite different, because in Cleveland the view is clear, and the great dome seems to float on light. In Seattle, the openings are busy, and function more as decorative base or border.

These screens should also be considered in relation to the articulation of the Ark wall, where a large screen surrounds a monument wall in the shape of the Tables of the Commandments against which the Ark itself is place. By 1960 such decorative screens were becoming increasingly common in large sanctuaries as a way to stitch together the lower and higher parts of the space - uniting as it were -e earth and heaven. There is a long architectural history of these types of screens in ritual spaces that will have to wait for another time. Suffice it to say we find screens and grilles in ancient synagogues, as well as those from the Ghetto period - but at least in the latter case - as in Amsterdam or Venice - the screens were designed to separate men and women.

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Ceiling. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Ceiling. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Ceiling. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore Hebrew Congregation. Sanctuary, ark wall. Percival Goodman, architect, 1948.

Cleveland, Ohio. Park Synagogue, sanctuary. Erich Mendelsohn, architect, 1953. Photo: Paul Rocheleau, 2002.

Cleveland, Ohio. Park Synagogue, sanctuary. Erich Mendelsohn, architect, 1953. Photo: Paul Rocheleau, 2002.

Baltimore, Maryland. Oheb Shalom. Walter Gropius and Sheldon Leavitt, architects, 1960. Photo: Sussman-Oches in Kampf, Contemporary Synagogue Art, p. 36

Thanks to Rabbi Aaron Meyer and Librarian Toby Harris for showing me around Temple De Hirsch Sinai back in December 2016. I look forward to a return visit.