An American Jewish artist is creating new stained glass windows for a church in Germany that occupies a former synagogue. The aim is to enhance the present identity of the building by incorporating its past.
“It’s been quite a journey,” says artist Barney Zeitz, who lives on Martha’s Vineyard and has been working on the project since 2015. “It’s a very meaningful project for me.”
In this video he describes the project and his involvement:
The simple little synagogue in Flieden, north of Frankfurt, built in 1875, was damaged but not destroyed by the Nazis on Kristallnacht in 1938, and in 1951 it was converted into an Evangelical church. The interior remains very simple, with three tall, arched windows on each side of the bare sanctuary (an extension with a window on either side was added during the reconstruction into a church).
After Marie Ariel, whose father had celebrated his Bar Mitzvah in the synagogue in 1899, visited the church in 2013, the pastor and congregation felt the need to incorporate its history into their current place of worship.
“How do we tell the story of this house, the two stories of this House of God: this synagogue and this Evangelical church?” the church web site states. There had long been a memorial plaque commemorating the Holocaust, it states. But what about the time before, from 1875 to 1933, it asked, “when the people here lived, celebrated and mourned in a normal fashion?”
The church decided to accomplish this through art — and, reaching him through Ariel and her contacts, commissioned Zeitz (who has created several other memorials, including a Holocaust memorial in Rhode Island) to design new stained glass windows:
So then the two stories of this house come together and can be reconciled with each other.
The design focuses on “a prayer for peace — Aaron’s priestly prayer” depicted in Hebrew, with stars of David motifs, in the windows on the right side of the building and in German, with crosses, on the left.
By this summer, Zeitz had completed three windows — and in early July he reported on the project’s Facebook page that he is working on assembling the fourth.
This article describes the process of creating the windows:
Zeitz begins with panes of single-color glass. He breaks them multiple times, recalling Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, he said. But then he fuses them together, creating beauty out of the shards.
“There’s this broken, re-fused, broken, re-fused quality to it—I’d call it magical,” he said.
The project is being sponsored by the Permanent Endowment for Martha’s Vineyard (where crowd-funding donations can be made).
Click here to follow the project, with pictures, on Facebook
