achieved. When asked, Rick Brown was known for answering with a promising glimmer in his eye as if he knew something we didn’t, “Wait, and you’ll see.”
For years they did not wait. They worked.
Student groups contributed to the research, recreating beautiful physical studies that inspired more experts to get involved; moreover, inviting exhibitions and workshops with more institutions. Many participants became attached to the project, inspired to be part of a community doing something meaningful, working intently with their hands and minds reawakening remarkable human heritage that we all lost. Some started as young adults and contributed for more than
a decade, evolving into highly skilled project leaders teaching others what they had learned.
Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Poland, Rick and Laura had the opportunity to set off for the better part of a year to follow their curiosity exploring every dusty church roof structure and historic archive they could find.
By 2006, a major effort was underway to build a new museum on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. Rather than seeking to buld another Holocaust memorial, the museum leadership wanted to create a museum committed to telling the 1,000-year history of Jewish life in Poland.
A Jewish museum in Warsaw wanted a wooden
synagogue reconstruction. Handshouse Studio had spent years researching how to reconstruct one. In a film-worthy moment of serendipity, the core exhibition’s chief curator was encouraged to make time on a busy trip to New York to meet with the Handshouse co-founders. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, together with Rick and Laura Brown, having little idea who or what they were about to embark upon, travelled
to meet each other. Within minutes, years of
working in parallel aligned.
I would be remiss to diminish the millions of nearly impossible challenges they would still
face in actualizing their dream of reawakening
this cultural heritage, but thanks to a
commitment to a shared vision and propensity for persistence, the POLIN Museum partnered with Handshouse Studio to establish an educational project to produce the full-scale reconstruction of the timber roof, painted ceiling and Bimah of the Gwoździec Synagogue.
Following the Handshouse method, the reconstruction workshops invited students and professionals to come together from all over the world, to work side-by-side, using the tools and materials of the original makers. To make the project more accessible, Rick and Laura asked that each of the thirteen workshops Handshouse offered be held in a different community in Poland.
Reaching out to the many people they had met
during their field research, Handshouse brought groups of students to some of the lesser visited towns and villages. We set up workshops to tackle sections of the Gwoździec Synagogue
inside some of the masonry synagogues still standing in towns throughout the country,
promoting awareness about the origins of these stone structures in the process of
recreating a wooden one that had not survived. Locals who stumbled upon the project were
welcomed to observe or join the effort. And so,
131
For me, it has been the greatest privilege probably of my life, to be able to partake of the creation of this. I went to bang in the last pegs. I spent a week with a granddaughter painting…I painted a single flower. Reclaiming our heritage is something that will enrich us all.
- Irene Pletka, YIVO Center for Jewish Research, Board Director