through the process of the hand-in-action, empowering personal, tactile understanding of the object’s ingenuity and cultural significance. In this way, we even connect with fellow human beings across time, reawakening history and heritage that cannot otherwise be brought to life.
We Listen to Its Story
When Handshouse Studio turned its attention to the lost wooden synagogues of Poland, hardly anyone knew they once existed across the entire Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The records remaining revealed that these timber structures were often remarkable demonstrations of carpentry, with multi-tiered roofs, complex vaulted wooden ceilings, and intricately carved bimahs (the central podium where the reading of the Torah scroll takes place.) Most notably, the prayer halls of these
synagogues were often vibrantly painted with images covering their walls and curved ceilings. More than 200 of these stunning wooden synagogues were built between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but by the end of 1939, all of them had been destroyed.
Cultural heritage lost by natural disaster, accident, or decay is different from calculated destruction by harmful intent. Handshouse Studio was not founded on a mission to focus on emotionally or politically complex subjects. Rather, the organizational mission is to create hands-on learning projects with communities, institutions, and partners to illuminate history, explore science, and perpetuate the arts. Led by an authentic desire to understand the meaning embedded in objects created by individuals and communities all around our world, Handshouse collaborations offer the gift of collective attention toward artifacts of human expression not to objectify the works, but to uncover and listen to the stories embodied within them.
When Handshouse embarked on what collectively became known as the Wooden Synagogue Project, we did so knowing that studying these objects would involve looking at their broader story. This focus followed the
same Handshouse methodology: starting with
an object and asking questions to accurately reconstruct it. But this series of collaborations was also conducted with an added level of sensitivity to the impact of the investigation: the acknowledgment that objects like these
also carry the weight of the manner of their destruction, an added component in considering reconstruction. Medieval cranes were always temporary structures, which allowed Handshouse a kind of rambunctiousness in recreating these large unwieldy pieces of history with no plan for
where to put them. But because synagogues are the literal roof-and-walls that hold together the sacred space of a community, reconstructing a full-scale synagogue would not be appropriate in the absence of a commitment from a community to sustain a
replica. And so, Rick and Laura invited students to focus on individual elements of these buildings as detailed in archival records by studying and recreating scale models of architectural elements and doing extensive studies of the painted imagery.
When our research revealed enough unanswered questions, Handshouse began taking groups of participants to remote corners of Poland and Ukraine to complete field studies on other kinds of standing period structures that could offer details about the regional
joinery as well as information about the kinds of pigments that had been available at the time of their construction.
Workshop by workshop, year after year, art and architecture students, historians, and makers collaborated, chipping away at these and other countless unknowns. Handshouse participants built scale models of the Zabłudów and Gwoździec Synagogues, a full-scale model of
Zabłudów Synagogue’s door, a full-scale model of Gwoździec’s bimah, a half-scale model of most of Gwoździec’s painted ceiling, and a full-scale Polish Bell Tower. While every
investigation illuminated some part of the details needed for reconstruction, nobody had
any idea how or if the improbable goal of rebuilding a full scale synagogue would ever be
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