Newish and Jewish from Europe: Refugees, Survivors and the Spread of Modernism | Fritz Ascher Society

In this talk, Samuel D. Gruber will present the architecture of the American Jewish community, which was transformed following World War II by émigré and refugee architects engaged to design synagogues and Jewish Community Centers.

Eric Mendelsohn’s synagogues for St. Louis, Cleveland and elsewhere are well known but the work of Fritz Nathan, Mendelsohn’s German-Jewish contemporary, is virtually forgotten. Nathan arrived in the United States in 1940 and designed synagogues, teamed with émigré artists, in the New York and New Haven metro areas. Both architects helped create the architectural language for Jewish institutional buildings that was adopted by American colleagues. We can now add the work of refugee architects David Moed of Antwerp (arrived 1939), and Norbert Troller from Brno who after surviving Terezin and Auschwitz came to America and designed scores of JCCs from the late 1940s through the early 1960s for small Jewish communities across America. Other Jewish refugees and survivors including German born but American educated Werner Seligman (1930-1998) and Benjamin Hirsch (1932-2018) also champion a modern aesthetic for synagogues and other buildings.

Samuel D. Gruber has been a leader in the documentation, protection, and preservation of historic Jewish sites worldwide for thirty years. He presently directs Gruber Heritage Global, a cultural resource consulting firm and is president of the not-for-profit International Survey of Jewish Monuments. Dr. Gruber is an expert on Jewish art and architecture about which he writes and lectures frequently. He is author of American Synagogues: A Century of Architecture and Jewish Community (2003) and Synagogues (1999) and scores of published reports and articles. Since 2008, he has written the blog Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art and Monuments.

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