Jewish built heritage in Ukraine & Poland: Some recent articles of note

Sergey R. Kravtsov of the Center for Jewish Art at Hebrew University has uploaded to academia.edu several of his recent articles, papers, and lectures on Jewish heritage in Ukraine, Poland (and elsewhere), which can be downloaded from the site in PDF form.

They are well worth noting, dealing with issues including the architecture of synagogues and other Jewish buildings, and the issue of the Jewish museum in L’viv.

The latest paper uploaded is:

“The Israelite Hospital in Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv, 1898–1912: ‘Jewish’ Architecture by an ‘International’ Team.” It was published in the journal Jews and Slavs 25 (2016)

The article describes the history and the architecture of the hospital — today L’viv’s maternity hospital — which Kravtsov terms “the most sumptuous Jewish landmark in today’s cityscape of L’viv.” Built in 1898-1903, the building still conserves the stars of David in the decorative brickwork under its distinctive dome.

Click to access site to download full article

Other articles include:

“The Jewish Museum in L’viv: genius loci and Realpolitik.” This is a lecture presented at “Synagogue and Museum,” the Third International Congress on Jewish Architecture, Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, November 22, 2016.

The article discusses the history of the pre-World War II Jewish museum in L’viv, and the possible fate and future plans for the now-derelict building on Shalom Aleichem street in L’viv.

Wooden Synagogues of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: between Polish and Jewish Narratives. Lecture at the symposium Stella, Abstract Art, and Synagogues, Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw, May 12, 2016. (Two PDF files: text and illustrations)

Synagogues with a broadened entrance front were numerous in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the early eighteenth century. This type originated in wooden construction: the first masonry synagogue of similar massing was built only in 1764–74. A theory deriving this synagogue type from Polish wooden construction lore and a model of a nobleman’s manor was proposed by Kazimierz Mokłowski (1869–1905) in 1903. Though a national romanticist construct and a product of historical materialism, this theory captivated researchers with its obviousness; it was almost unanimously accepted in Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Jewish scholarship. While not dismissing the basics of Mokłowski’s theory, the present paper pursues an alternative, iconographic approach to a synagogue with a broadened front. It points out a novel graphical interpretation of the messianic Temple, proposed by R. Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller (ca. 1579‒1654) in the first half of the seventeenth century and increasingly popular in the Jewish thought. A comparison between the contemporary imagery of the Temple and the built shape of wooden synagogues discloses a Jewish eschatological meaning of the latter, discernible on parallel with the dependence on Polish construction lore.

Sergey Kravtsov and Vladimir Levin, “Velyka synahoha v Ostrozi [The Great Synagogue in Ostroh].”  Arkhitekturna spadshchyna Volyni [Architectural Heritage of Volhynia], ed. Petro Rychkov, vol. 5 (Rivne: PPDM, 2016) (In Ukrainian)

A discussion of the history and architecture of the Great Maharsha Synagogue in Ostroh, which is currently under restoration. Kravtsov also wrote about this synagogue in a JHE “Have Your Say” essay in December, 2015 — Memory and Oblivion: Have we reached the point of no return?

Kravtsov has posted a number of other downloadable articles, papers and lectures on Jewish built heritage — click here to access the full list