An exhibition of some of the extraordinary painted ceiling panels created during the Gwozdziec synagogue reconstruction project is on display until the end of July at the Arkady Kubickiego (Kubicki Arcade) of the Royal Castle in Warsaw.
An 85 percent scale model of the tall peaked roof and richly decorated inner cupola of the wooden synagogue that once stood in Gwozdziec (now in Ukraine) are being reconstructed is a project of the Handshouse Studio and the forthcoming Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The reconstructed roof and cupola will be a major installation at the new Museum, which is due to open in the autumn of 2013. Last summer, in the first stage of the project, students, master timber-framers and volunteers gathered in Sanok, southeastern Poland, to build the structure, using hand tools that would have been used centuries ago.
This summer, at workshops held in synagogues around Poland, teams of students and volunteers have been carrying out the colorful, elaborate paintings that cover in the interior of the cupola—and it is these that are on display now in Warsaw. You can read more about these workshops, which are still going on, on the project’s blog.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who heads the team developing the museum’s core exhibition, has kindly allowed JHE to post some of her pictures of the opening of the exhibition, including close-ups of the panels.
It was fitting that at the opening, Maria Piechotka, now 92, was honored for the pioneering work that she and her late husband, Kazimierz Piechotka, carried out in writing about and documenting the destroyed wooden synagogues of Poland. Their 1959 book Wooden Synagogues was and remains a highly influential landmark publication.
Click on the thumbnails to enlarge.
Meanwhile — Tomek Wisniewski in Bialystok has uploaded this video of pictures of the Gwozdziec synagogue, inside and out, before its destruction.