The Jewish holiday of Sukkoth, the “festival of booths,” starts tonight and lasts a week. It is both a harvest festival and a commemoration of the years Jews spent wandering in the desert in Biblical times.
Jews traditionally build temporary sukkahs, or sheds that recall the wandering period. Also at Sukkoth, Jews ritually bind together four species of plants — an etrog, or citron (a citrus fruit similar to a big lemon); a lulav, or palm branch; two willow branches (aravot) and three myrtle branches — as Leviticus 23:40 put it:
On the first day, you will take for yourselves a fruit of a beautiful tree, palm branches, twigs of a braided tree and brook willows, and you will rejoice before the lord your God for seven days.
Sukkahs are often decorated with fruits and vegetables celebrating the harvest.
And the lulav and etrog are so identified with Jewish practice that (along with the menorah) they have been powerful symbols of Judaism for centuries. Here, for example, an ancient Roman-era Jewish gravestone has an inscribed menorah, flanked by a lulav and etrog and a shofar. It is displayed in the MEIS museum in Ferrara, Italy:
Sukkahs — or a space for a sukkah — have also sometimes been incorporated into synagogue complexes or private homes, and some are being preserved, either on the spot or in Jewish museums.
The Sukkah Project, spearheaded by the Polish visual artist Magdalena Ciemierkiewicz and carried out in collaboration with the Zapomniane Foundation, was launched in 2022 to preserve the wooden, balcony-like sukkah that was attached to a building in the town of Izbica, in eastern Poland.
Before the Holocaust, the town was 80 percent Jewish. During the war it served as a transit ghetto. Almost all Jews were shot in mass executions at the Jewish cemetery or deported to their deaths at Sobibor and Bełżec.
In recent years, the building where the sukkah was found was slated for demolition, and the Sukkah Project’s goal was to dismantle it, restore it, and eventually “return [it] to Izbica as a performative monument, with its opening roof serving as a symbolic act of remembrance for the Jewish community that once lived in the town.”
The project takes the form of a long-term process involving various groups, including local residents—both adults and children from the local school—the town administration, researchers, artists, and activists.
The conserved sukkah formed part of an exhibition of work by Ciemierkiewicz at the Labirynt Gallery in Lublin, last spring.
In September, a series of educational events pegged to the sukkah was held in Izbica.
You can see a detailed photographic documentation of the demolition and conservation process, as well as the educational events, on the project’s web page.
Watch a video on Vimeo of the process of dismantling the sukkah.