American synagogue buildings have been generally “unexplored, unmined and ignored by the Jewish and larger artistic and architectural community of America,” contended Samuel D. Gruber.
Yet these buildings from the earliest years of the country (1791) to today show how Jewish communities throughout the United States seized the opportunity and mustered the creativity to “express their goals through public buildings,” said Gruber, who is director of the Jewish Heritage Research Center in Syracuse, N.Y.
Gruber displayed on slides, mostly taken from his book “American Synagogues” (Rizzoli International Publications, 2003), and described a wide range of American synagogues to about 50 people gathered at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library Sunday.
The presentation was the last in a series of events last week in which the Polish Center of Wisconsin, UWM’s Center for Jewish Studies and School of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning collaborated to explore a “Common Heritage: The Wooden Synagogues of Poland.”
In a lecture titled “The American Synagogue and Jewish Identity: From Old World to New,” Gruber showed how American Jews expressed concerns, made statements about themselves and what they wanted from Judaism and from the general community at different times and places.
Congregations that are interested in community activism and “good works” will tend to build “open” synagogue buildings, while those more interested in “mysticism” and retreating from the world for spiritual recharging will tend to build “closed, insular” structures, he said.
The buildings also show how American Jews have been willing to follow local fashions.
Thus the first synagogue building constructed in the post-Revolutionary War United States — Congregation Beth Elohim in Charleston, S.C. — did not look very different from area churches. It even included a spire which was “a requirement to denote a house of worship” then, Gruber said.
But if the outside blended into the architectural environment, the inside was very Jewish in the Sephardic manner. This expressed the message of many American synagogues: “The outside meets the requirements of the outside community; inside we are free to be ourselves,” Gruber said.
Through the 19th century, Jews in the United States and elsewhere built synagogues according to architectural fashions of the various times and places, Gruber said. Only in Poland “and a few other places” did Jews evolve “a style uniquely theirs,” he said.
So some American synagogues look like Greek or Roman temples in the manner of other public buildings (post offices, city halls) in some communities. Others followed a fashion for “Byzantine” styles — like Congregation Beth Israel’s previous building, dedicated in 1925 on Teutonia Ave. in Milwaukee.
Yet others tried to be inconspicuous, looking like local churches or even like private homes.
After World War II and the Jewish flight to the suburbs, a new kind of synagogue building came into being, pioneered by American Jewish architect Percival Goodman (1904-1989).
Gruber said that Goodman “invented the idea of the suburban synagogue” and designed about 50 of them. “He translated the modernist building vocabulary, which had been primarily used for industrial and commercial design and then avant-garde residential buildings, into a language appropriate for religious buildings,” Gruber wrote in his book.
Moreover, Goodman pioneered the use of modern sculpture on the outside of a synagogue building, as though sending a message “Inside we have the past; on the outside, the future,” said Gruber.
Since then, American synagogues have been built in a wide variety of modern styles, including one by the greatest American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright (in 1957 for Congregation Beth Sholom in Elkins Park, Pa.).
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