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Traveling Exhibition: "Wooden Synagogues: A Lost World Revisited"

Magnificent Polish 18th century wooden synagogues were destroyed during the Nazi invasion of World War II, but fortunately they live on in the form of architectural drawings and photos. This traveling exhibition draws on the historic documentation available and scale models built by students to show the architectural significance of the wooden synagogues and the nearly lost cultural heritage of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.

The exhibition is currently at the National Yiddish Book Center until March 2006. Read more.

With funding from the Massachusetts Foundation for Humanities, we have organized the exhibition with lectures and events at the Vilna Shul, the oldest existing synagogue in Boston (opening spring 2005).


We're in two languages!

Our Zabludow synagogue model is featured on this Polish language site: http://www.szukamypolski.com/ radarxl.php?id=970&f=8&gal=

 

Handshouse Studio, a not-for-profit innovative educational organization, initiates adventurous hands-on projects as a way to explore history, understand science, and perpetuate the arts.

If you want to understand the world,
    you must look from many sides.
If you look from many sides
    you will see the three dimensions.
If you map the three dimensions,
    you will begin to understand.
Build it and you will learn.

Gwozdziec Synagogue
Wooden Ceiling Painting Replica Project

The Gwozdziec Synagogue was a remarkable wooden synagogue built in the Polish Lithuanian Empire in 1731 and destroyed during World War II. Working with faculty and historic experts, students researched and painted the complex historic images of the north vaulted ceiling. The students brought to life the photographs and showed the broad palate of deep intense colors that saturated the prayer hall with intricate designs like those of an oriental carpet. Read about the high school painting project.

Wooden Synagogues


  Gwozdziec
  Zabludow


The Turtle

The Cranes


  2006 Medieval Crane
  Perronet, Diderot


The Obelisk

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