After four years of work, stained glass windows by a Jewish American artist have been installed and dedicated in a church in Germany that occupies a former synagogue.
The six vividly colorful windows by the artist Barney Zeitz were dedicated Sunday at the church, a small, simple building in the town of Flieden, northeast of Frankfurt. The installation of the windows was part of a fullscale renovation of the building.
“The dedication ceremony was very meaningful,” Zeitz, who lives on Martha’s Vineyard and has been working on the project since 2015, told JHE.
We wrote about the project two years ago, including a video of work to date.
The little synagogue in Flieden was built in 1875 and was damaged but not destroyed by the Nazis on Kristallnacht in 1938. 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).
The sanctuary itself remains free of decoration, except for the windows.
“The church in the former synagogue decided to make the only color in the building be in the windows,” Zeitz told JHE.
The story of the windows began 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 the building’s 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.
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.
At the dedication ceremony, Bishop Martin Hein from Kassel gave his last sermon before retirement, and there were speakers from the Berlin parliament, the government in Kassel, and the mayor of Flieden.
In his speech, Bishop Hein recalled the history of the building and gave an impassioned condemnation of antisemitism and the responsibility of Germans for the Shoah.
“With shame and grief,” he said, “we [today] must also face the blatant injustice that the generation of our parents and grandparents has committed or allowed to remain silent. There is no escape into oblivion for us. The Shoah is part of German history.”
He warned, however, that in recent times antisemitism is becoming “socially acceptable” in Germany — and must be combatted.
The windows of the church and the commitment of its congregations, he said, were a positive sign in difficult times.
The windows project has been sponsored by the Permanent Endowment for Martha’s Vineyard.
Click here to see our article about the project two years ago, including a video of work to date.
Click here to follow the project, with pictures, on Facebook
1 comment on “Germany Update: Stained glass windows by US Jewish artist dedicated in German church housed in a former synagogue”
This is an amazing story. I did not k ow about the art tha t was memorialized in the windows. This is magnificent, and a powerful reminder for all.