Dr. Samuel D. Gruber spoke in Burlington, Vermont on Nov. 9 and 10 about the town’s “Lost Shul Mural” — a complex, brightly color mural, painted in 1910 by the Lithuanian immigrant Ben Zion Black, that once adorned the interior of the former Chai Adam synagogue.
Black, states the web site devoted to the preservation of the mural,
was brought from Lithuania by the congregation to paint the synagogue in the prevalent style of the wooden shuls of Eastern European. Decades later the synagogues in Burlington merged and the Chai Adam building was sold several times before ultimately being converted into apartment units. Much of the painting was destroyed during the renovation but the mural over the ark was covered by a wall and forgotten until 2012 when the Lost Shul Mural was uncovered for the first time in nearly thirty years.”
The Lost Shul Mural is part of a widespread tradition of Eastern European synagogue wall paintings that was almost entirely obliterated during the Shoah […] by the Nazis. Few of these treasures survived in Europe and most of those were located in Jewish communities that simply no longer existed. Time and the elements have nearly wiped out this type of Jewish folk art, but the Lost Shul Mural is a remnant of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, transplanted to the US by a Jewish immigrant artist. It may be the only surviving example of its type which adorned an American synagogue sanctuary.
In his illustrated lecture, Dr. Gruber describes the mural in the context of East European synagogue painting and also provides a detailed analysis of the symbolic and artistic elements in it — from the painted curtains to the rampant lions holding up the Ten Commandments, to the crown above them.
In his second lecture, he goes more into the symbolism and art in general, with a focus on Jewish immigrant art in America.
He notes that few such paintings survive intact in Lithuania or other parts of east-central Europe where such a mixture of religious iconography and folk art were once very prevalent.
A number of synagogues with folk-style painted interiors do survive, particularly in Romania, but also in Poland and Ukraine. But in many cases the painting is fragmentary, as in the example below, from a synagogue in Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland now used as a library.
