We are saddened to learn of the death of Gilbert Weil, an architect and urbanist who was long a tireless activist for Jewish heritage in Alsace and the founder of the Jewish Alsatian Museum in Bouxwiller. He passed away March 4 in Jerusalem, aged 93.
May his memory be a blessing!
Born in Strasbourg July 12, 1929, Weil worked as an urban planner in various places in France and was a professor at the University of Aix-Marseille. On retirement, he devoted himself to the preservation and promotion of Jewish cultural heritage in Alsace.
In 1983, Weil and other committed individuals founded the Friends of the Jewish Alsatian Museum of Bouxwiller (AMJAB), a lobby group aimed at saving from demolition the then-derelict synagogue in Bouxwiller and creating a museum there dedicated to Alsatian Jewry. This group, together with the heritage commission organized by the B’nai B’rith in Strasbourg, eventually expanded its focus to include the preservation of Alsatian Jewish heritage in general.
“In 1984, the problem of abandoned and derelict synagogues in villages was a taboo subject,” Weil said in 1999 in a presentation at a major conference in Paris on Jewish monuments and heritage sites. Local authorities, he said, felt that any action regarding these places was solely the responsibility of local Jews — and Jewish officialdom at the time had little interest, either.
The Jewish Alsatian Museum was officially inaugurated in the restored Bouxwiller synagogue on June 28, 1998, after more than a decade of planning.
The synagogue, built in 1852, was desecrated by the Nazis.
In his speech at the dedication of the museum, the Ernest Luft, mayor of Bouxwiller from 1971-1995, recalled how it looked when he saw it as a child:
At the beginning of 1941 I entered the building, curious as all kids are. The door was open to the winds, the panes of the windows broken. Inside it was desolation: vandals and other well-meaning “Juddehasser” (who hates Jews) had, little by little, ransacked everything. And the local authorities, on purpose, had allowed it to happen. The Aron Hakodesh, that sacred cupboard where the Torah scrolls are carefully stored, had been gutted, desecrated.
Everything was lying on the floor among the shards of glass and the torn boards: parchments and manuscripts of biblical texts, phylacteries with their leather strips, mapoth and other religious objects, trampled on, crumpled, torn, soiled. Despite my young age, I had understood the abomination, the monstrosity of this sacrilege.
He also described in some detail what he called the “genesis of the museum”:
In 1983-84 the situation concerning the synagogue, of which the Weil family held the keys, can be summarized as follows:
-
-
a building in poor condition, little or no longer used as a place of prayer by a community reduced to a few members;
-
a Jewish Consistory, owner of the premises, who was in a hurry to get rid of a building which was becoming cumbersome for him;
-
a local trade which sought to acquire it to shave it in order to arrange a carpark in its place, and that with the downstream, not to say the blessing of the departmental services concerned;
-
January 1984 – first deliberation of the Municipal Council which, I quote “is not opposed to the decommissioning of the synagogue, and gives its full support to a project for an eco-museum of Judaism”. The project – at the time it was rather an idea, an intention – came to us, you understood, from Gilbert Weil. It was he who, in the years 1984-85, was able, and I am infinitely grateful to him, to block the sale and therefore the planned demolition of the building. Thanks to his tenacity and his intervention at the highest level in Paris, he obtained registration in the Inventory of Historic Monuments in record time. The synagogue, which had miraculously survived the Nazi occupation, was now completely safe.
-
July 1986 – by emphyteutic lease the Consistory rents the synagogue to the City for a period of 30 years and a symbolic rent. A major obstacle had been removed;
-
finally, on December 4 of the same year, the Municipal Council adopted the Judeo-Alsatian museum project for an amount of 1,343,000 F TTC nearly 12 years later we are able to inaugurate it.
-
In 2019, Weil was interviewed in two YouTube videos about his activities and the museum (in French):