Academic literature on the topic 'Jewish architects'

Before 1939, Jewish architects were active members of their profession, participating in domestic and international architectural networks and contributing to the built environment of Polish cities. From the mid-1930s, however, intensifying antisemitism and far-right political forces pressured architectural networks to exclude Jews from professional unions. The start of the Second World War and the German occupation in 1939 strained professional architectural networks but led to the formation of underground workshops, cooperatives, and other groups, whose connections extended from Warsaw through the camps and ghettos of occupied Poland. This article presents the history of Jewish-Polish architects from 1937 to 1945. Demonstrating how architectural networks reacted to changing conditions of war, occupation, and genocide, it emphasizes architectural networks as sites of political engagement, ranging from prewar antisemitic attacks on Jews and their removal from the Society of Polish Architects (SARP) to underground architectural networks that hid Jews and allowed them to work. Although the fate of Jewish architects depended largely on their relationships with their professional networks, they also actively decided how to utilize those networks to resist the Nazis and to ensure their survival. This research shows that interpersonal relationships and wartime networks were consequential in determining the wartime fates of Jewish architects and also shaped the profession’s post-war structure.

The article examines the interwar period in the life and work of two architects, Usher Chiter (1899–1967) and Elyukim Maltz (1898–1973), both graduates of the Odessa School of Architecture. During that time the architects were doing work for the Mendele Moicher Sforim All-Ukrainian Museum of Jewish Proletarian Culture in Odessa. Based on documents and visual materials from a number of museums and archives located in Ukraine, Russia and Israel, as well as on private collections (including those of families of architects from Moscow, where Chiter and Maltz moved in the late 1920s),the author attempts to trace and reconstruct the two architects’ research expeditions across the former Pale of Jewish Settlement.A total of seven field trips were conducted in Podolia and the Soviet part of Volhynia – with the aim of collecting materials and exhibition items for the museum and of making nature drawings and watercolors showing Jewish sites, such as synagogues, cemeteries and residential buildings.This empirical approach exemplifies the method of preserving and representing disintegrating Jewish shtetls, commonly practised during the interwar period. The work of both architects is viewed through the prism of musealization of Jewish heritage in the early Soviet period which was closely connected to the formation of state ideology and its transition from «building of the national identity» to class paradigm and atheistic upbringing.

Bucharest multiculturalism was a feature of its cultural life throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. It contributed to the interwar architectural development and creative output of Bucharest. This development envolved some lesser known jewish architects such as: Emanuel Arnet, Leon Silion, Jean Krakauer, Iacob Rosinthal, Harry Schoenberg. The opinions expressed by interwar architects concerning modern architecture was facing the opposition of traditionalist architects. The modernisation of Bucharest was a matter of architecture and identity. Therefore the article also makes a hypothesis concerning the anonimity of a magazine report about the modern architecture of Bucharest published in “Romanian ilustration” of 24.08.1932. This magazine report was published in the antisemitic atmosphere in interwar Bucharest. Based on some clues the article attempts to identify the authors of the report, both the interviewed architect and the journalist. The article will give a general outline concerning the life and activity of the presumed author, the architect and artist Heinrich Schoenberg. The Sionist interests of Henry Shoenberg’s siblings and family will also be discussed.

AbstractThis article participates in efforts by IR theorists to clarify aspects of modern sovereignty – an idea currently in rupture and being rethought – by returning to its founding ‘Westphalian moment’. While recent work has reconnected modern sovereignty to religion, considering Westphalia as a religious settlement and Christian concerns persisting in the groundwork of IR, our work looks beyond Christian concerns and asks how Westphalian sovereignty addressed non-Christians. We trace a yet-untapped discussion of the Jews – presented as a paradigmatic religious ‘other’ – among architects of Westphalian sovereignty from Bodin through Grotius, Hobbes, Harrington, and Spinoza. We demonstrate that foundational theorists of modern sovereignty considered religious diversity a political problem. Some cited essential sameness, minimising difference between Jews and Christians. Others considered the possibility of Jewish sovereignty long before this idea is usually considered to have entered modern consciousness. While the discussion of Jewish sovereignty among architects of modern sovereignty may seem to justify a Jewish state in a world of Westphalian states, it also emphasises Westphalia’s territorialising of religious difference. This aspect of the Westphalian framework is surely inadequate today, when territorialising religious difference is neither normative nor likely possible.

Introduction: The phenomenon of expressing national identity in architecture is manifested in many countries and cities. In this article, it is considered in the context of Lviv with the main focus on Jewish architects. Purpose of the study: We are planning to study the process of the emergence of a new Jewish style in the architecture of Lviv from the mid-19th century to the first decades of the 20th century in the context of urban development, and consider the formation of a characteristic art language, together with the corresponding symbolic elements of décor. Methods: We use a comprehensive art approach, which involves the method of systematization for material processing, comparison and synthesis. In the course of the study, we applied comparative analysis, as well as elements of systematic analysis of the Jewish architecture evolution. Results and discussion: We conclude that the architects used several strategies and theories to express Jewish cultural identity in their works, in particular, neo-romantic transformations of medieval, Renaissance and Oriental architecture, rethinking in the spirit of Art Nouveau of the Neo-Moorish style, incorporation of old regional architecture motifs, applying decor saturated with Jewish symbols.

In Design and Contestation in the Jewish Settlement of Hebron, 1967–87, Noam Shoked explores how this settlement, built on lands Israel captured from Jordan in the Six-Day War of 1967, became a site of both collaboration and confrontation among architects, settlers, and government officials. Working for the government, architects at first sought to mitigate the ambitions of the settlers, but their plans were undermined by unexpected actors, such as amateur archaeologists and volunteer architects, who commandeered their designs. Unearthing the architectural history of the settlement, this article questions the received history of settlement design as the outcome of military strategy and points to the unanticipated ways in which Hebron's religious settlers drew on mainstream architectural culture to fashion their identities.

The architects Louis Kahn (1901-1974) and Chloethiel Woodard Smith (1910-1992) were near contemporaries whose networks overlapped in multiple ways. Kahn’s best buildings offer transcendent experiences of community; Smith’s remain cherished, if far more ordinary, places to live and work. Although the level of fame the profession bestowed upon him eluded her, in the 1960s and early 1970s her singularity as a female architect working on a national scale led her to be frequently profiled in the popular press. Kahn began as an outsider because of his working-class Jewish background; Smith remained one because she was a woman, although she was highly ambivalent about, and -- when well enough established -- outrightly dismissive of being labeled a woman or – worse yet – lady architect. Each also benefited from their status as relatively privileged white Americans, while building for African Americans and in the Global South. Tracing the arc of their careers captures the opportunities for upward mobility that the postwar boom created in the United States, as well as ones that the Cold War bestowed upon its best-connected architects, even as it illuminates the obstacles that continued to hinder the progression of women in the profession.

The architect Franja Urban belongs to the group of foreign architects who arrived in Belgrade in the wake of the First World War, leaving as a legacy a lasting contribution to its urban development and architectural design. Franja Urban arrived from Czechoslovakia as a result of links to the Ashkenazi Jewish community, and, from 1926 until his untimely death in 1937, he worked as a private architect specializing in the field of residential and industrial architecture. Although Urban left behind a rich architectural opus, so far no monographic article has been published that would shed light on and further valorize his work in Belgrade and beyond. This article stems from many years of research into Urban's life and work, and represents the first attempt to frame his work within the context of modern Serbian architecture.

This article explores Jews’ role in mediating artistic exchange between Italy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century, through a case study examining the cultural and historical context surrounding the construction of the Druja synagogue (ca. 1765-1766) by the Paracca family of immigrant Italian architects and masons, for the burgeoning Jewish community affiliated with the region’s reigning noble families. The article explores the circumstances surrounding the Druja synagogue as a manifestation of the so-called “Vilnius Baroque” school of late Baroque-Rococo architecture in the Grand Duchy. The synagogue design reanimated the grandeur of the past and represented notions of Italy in honor of Baltic Catholic patrons and Jewish clients. Jews emerge as scions and mediators of the geopolitical, spiritual and cultural crossroads at Druja, a historical inflection point when emerging divisions of conceptual geography gave rise to the notion of an “eastern Europe.”

Since the start of the 20th century, the presence of Jewish students on American university campuses required accommodation of their religious practices. Jewish activities, including prayer, took place in existing campus buildings designed for other purposes. Eventually, at some universities, facilities were built to serve Jewish religious and social needs. These Jewish Student Centers, which include worship spaces yet are typologically different from synagogues, generally have to accommodate the diverse religious streams that characterize Jewish life in the United States. To do so, both architects and Jewish organizations have adapted the idea of ecumenism, by which related sects seek unity through fellowship and dialogue, not doctrinal agreement. Three examples—at Yale, Duke University, and the University of California San Diego—demonstrate differently the situational ecumenism at the core of their designs. These buildings, and other Jewish Student Centers elsewhere, make visible the intersection between American collegiate and Jewish religious values, variously defined.

Abstract The main sources has been found recently of the works of the greats architects Max Tintner and Zikmund Kerekes, II. w.w. survivors, architects who extablished their lives after II. w.w. in Israel. Also new information has been occurred in reconnection with architect André Steiner who spent his life in Atlanta, USA. Archives materials about unknown work made by Otto Eisler was also found. The main intention of the PhD thesis is to collect those unsorted materials and information of mentioned architects and to create comparison of their architectural works.

The main objective of this thesis is the description and evaluation of the position of germen speaking architects acting in Prague in the period of First Republic in Czechoslovakia. After defining the terminology and social context the thesis sorts out the broad group of German speaking architects into two circles according to their cultural surrounding. The thesis shows existing reasons for assorting the architects inclining to purely German culture and to the cultural environment influenced by German and Czech at the same time. The position of German speaking architects is constituted by the references in the press and literature, educational institutions, association activities and role of building owners. The thesis contribution is the reflexion of the German speaking architects in their remaining memories and periodicals.

The present work undertakes a comprehensive evaluation of Prague's interwar architecture made by German-speaking architects. It works with a methodological framework built on three overlapping and intertwining layers. The first layer introduces the socio-political- historical-cultural conditions of the origin of architecture in Prague. It presents Prague as the main centre of the Czechoslovak Republic, specifies the role of the Prague City Hall, approaches the Jewish question, discusses Prague bilingualism and details the main platforms for German-speaking architects. The second layer divides the heterogeneous group of German-speaking architects according to their cultural circles and demonstrates the specifics of each cultural circle based on several case studies. Architects Rudolf Hildebrand, Adolf Foehr and Fritz Lehmann were chosen for the German cultural circle. In the circuit on the borderline between the Czech and German cultural environments, the architects are always presented in pairs: Erwin Katona - Berthold Schwarz, Ernst Mühlstein / Viktor Fürth - Otto and Karl Kohn and Rudolf Wels - Martin Reiner. The third layer of the work discusses Prague's German architecture in a broader perspective and places it within the European framework of German architecture. This framework is based on the...

(in English): The subject of this thesis is the work of a Jewish architect Jakob Gartner (1860 - 1921) in the fields of sacral and mundane architecture. The paper is limited to structures build on the territory of Austria-Hungary. The beginning of the thesis is dedicated to the emerging emancipation of Jews and their influence on the whole society. Right after is the introduction to the theoretical discussion about the style and form, which were preceding the newly created architecture. After this introduction, the paper is pursuing the person of the architect Jakob Gartner himself. The key part of the thesis presents constructed and only planned synagogues across the countries. In the end the focus dedicated to constructed, mostly Viennese, mundane buildings and constructions like a maternity hospital, villa and a larger number of apartment buildings. The final part of the paper is a complete list of the work of Jakob Gartner, which includes as well the buildings built in the regions of Moravia and Silesia.

This chapter discusses the fact that the producers of apologetic literature were also the major architects of the Christian system of thought and belief. It accounts for the work that was done to ensure internal cohesiveness, as well as the efforts that Christian communities made to form in opposition to both Greco-Roman social and political elements, and Jewish authority. Apologetic writings reflected an existing contemporary situation in which the borders between Christians, Jews, and Greeks were clearly discernible. They were engaged in the very discursive practice that was also endeavoring to bring these borders into existence. Both apologetic writers and their opponents sought to produce and police the borders between Christians, Jews, and Greeks.

This chapter focuses on 1928–1931, the years in which Betar began its transformation into a mass movement in Poland. Across Europe, admirers of Fascist Italy were sifting through Benito Mussolini's political program in search of an antidote to their own political challenges. Fascist ideology in Italy was replete with contradictions and in a state of perpetual flux. Fascist leaders often used this ideological ambiguity to their advantage. The chapter then looks at the workshops of Betar's cultural architects, as they designed an array of myths and rituals linking the group to Judaism and ancient Jewish history, and explores how these projects provided fertile ground for Betar's leaders to determine the extent to which they would embrace the beliefs and behaviors they associated with fascism.

This chapter gives an overview of installed arks and synagogues that still existed at the beginning of the twentieth century but were destroyed in the two world wars. It mentions surviving ark doors of synagogues that are now kept as museum items, which are considered silent witnesses to the rich tradition that was once part of Jewish life. It also reviews photographs of the arks that were taken before the Second World War and a few pre-war academic works and publications that were written mainly by architects and art historians, whose interest did not focus on Torah arks. The chapter refers to arks according to the name of their city or town of provenance, including their wider geographical location and other relevant information. It describes unique visual presentation of motifs that were never seen on arks, which characterized the period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

This chapter shows that Jewish political movements like the Freeland League did not function in isolation from their wider political and geopolitical contexts, even if such movements have often been studied as if they were barely affected by the non-Jewish world in which they existed. By discussing the Territorialists' navigation of geopolitical realities, the chapter helps to shed new light on the development of concepts related to population politics, agriculture and ‘agro-industry’, colonialism and post-colonialism, and the notion of ‘empty space’. These concepts helped forge the Freelanders' ideological direction that was largely decided in the interwar period. The chapter also looks at the year 1945, which often serves as a watershed moment, ushering in a new humanitarian geopolitical era. In reality, as the Territorialism's social engineering project demonstrates, striking continuities in geopolitical trends challenge this romantic interpretation. The chapter lays bare new aspects of such continuities before and directly following the Second World War, thereby defying the notion of 1945 as a ‘year zero’. It investigates how the Territorialists' new home, the United States, had become the almost undisputed global power centre, housing many of the political and scientific architects of the post-1945 world order. The chapter also reveals the manner in which the Freeland League adjusted to these changing global realities.

(New York: New York University Press, 1995); pp. xiii + 426 Salo Baron (1895‒1989), born in Tarnów, Galicia, became one of the foremost Jewish historians of the twentieth century and one of the pioneers of academic Jewish studies in the United States. Liberles attempts to interweave two stories in this first full-length study of Baron and his ...

This chapter looks at ten book reviews. The first three reviews discuss books on the first Hebrew novel, the Kraków reformed Jewish community, and the politics of Polish Jewry. The next three reviews consider books on the role of the left-wing movements in the Jewish tradition; the Hebrew poetry in Poland between the two world wars; and the impact of the Endecja's thought on the broader political spectrum, with respect to the question of ethnic minorities. The seventh review examines Natan Gross's The History of Jewish Cinema in Poland, which talks about the Jewish involvement in Polish cinema during the 1920s and 1930s. The last three reviews explore books on Salo Wittmayer Baron, an architect of Jewish history; the changing attitudes of Polish society towards the Holocaust; and the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, contemporary Poles' current views on Jews, and Polish Jewish survivors' perspectives on Poland and on Singer's writing.

Abstract The repeated moves of art historian Rachel Wischnitzer and her husband, historian and aid worker Mark Wischnitzer, show how closely the story of Jewish migrations was interwoven with the personal journeys of the men and women who tried to make sense of this subject. Rachel, a pioneering architect and art historian, became a crucial figure in the literary art scene of Berlin during the 1920s. Mark served as executive director of the main German Jewish aid association and helped a large number of Eastern European and, after 1933, German Jews to emigrate. Both were displaced repeatedly, in the aftermath of the First World War and again in 1939–1940 when they fled France. In the 1940s Mark Wischnitzer turned to the subject of Jewish migration history, publishing an extensive survey of Jewish migrations that reflected his experience as an aid worker and refugee from Nazi persecution.

El Call de Girona, su barrio judío, es uno de los conjuntos monumentales más importantes de Cataluña y por su nivel de conservación de toda Europa. Caracterizado por sus estrechas callejuelas, herederas de la trama romana de la Gerunda original, unido al resto del casco antiguo de la ciudad, se configuran como el centro histórico-urbano más importante de Cataluña. La creciente afluencia de turistas, junto con la sucesiva mejora y ordenación de las viviendas y edificios singulares que configuran el barrio, totalmente habitado y lleno de vida, está propiciando una serie de medidas urbanísticas para mejorar la accesibilidad al mismo a la vez que se consolida su uso residencial y de equipamientos, mediante una normativa de especial protección urbanística.
 
 Por otra parte esta ciudad dispone de un extraordinario sistema de información geográfica, (UMAT) Unidad Municipal de Análisis Territorial, que permite disponer de toda la cartografía urbana de la misma e incluso de un modelo de reconstrucción cartográfica virtual desarrollada por un equipo de expertos bajo los auspicios del Ayuntamiento de Girona y el Museo de Historia de la Ciudad. Tomando como entorno esta zona e información, se propone el desarrollo de una investigación aplicada dentro del ámbito de la expresión gráfica arquitectónica, fundada primero en un trabajo de análisis y estudio de las fuentes bibliográficas, cartográficas e históricas en materia de desarrollo histórico-urbano de la zona y en segundo lugar, en un estudio de aplicación de las modernas técnicas de representación SBIM Sketch Based Interface and Modeling y la AR, Augmented Reality.
 
 Fundiendo todos estos registros y campos de trabajo, se lanza la hipótesis de que es posible ampliar la traza de callejuelas actualmente existentes mediante la catalogación y levantamiento de dos nuevos callejones, que denominaremos 1, conocido antiguamente como el callejón “d’Hernandez” que proponemos renombrar como el de la Última Sinagoga y otro callejón, el nº 2 que llamaremos de “Les Dones”, recuperando una referencia histórica anterior, que hasta la fecha tan sólo estaban documentados como paso cerrado el 1 y sin pistas del 2, y que con nuestro trabajo de campo y aportación se ha visto que son perfectamente recuperables. 
 
 Esta recuperación se aborda en la investigación, mediante la simulación visual de los mismos usando las técnicas de SBIM y AR, antes citadas, de forma combinada y adaptadas a las especificidades del trabajo y habilidades de un arquitecto-urbanista, de manera que se desarrollan una serie de casos de estudio prácticos cuyo objetivo final es que un observador, situado ante la actual entrada tapiada del callejón, mediante un dispositivo tipo Tablet PC, conectado a una webcam y un programa de bajo coste, pueda hacerse una idea de cuál sería el aspecto de esa callejuela. 
 
 Esta estrategia de pre-visualización, ha de servir además para que el diseñador pueda plantear las posibles alternativas a su recuperación, no siempre evidentes si no evalúan sobre el lugar. En ese sentido y como arquitectos proponemos una solución arquitectónica en cada caso junto con el ensayo del uso de información sobre el terreno (UMAT) con el objetivo último de facilitar la accesibilidad a los diferentes monumentos y edificios patrimoniales del casco histórico de Girona.
 
 Por otra parte como docentes de expresión gráfica arquitectónica, ensayamos nuevas estratégicas que permitan potenciar la creatividad. Por último, con nuestro trabajo aspiramos a facilitar a los investigadores informáticos datos y experiencias, que les permitan optimizar las nuevas herramientas y procesos, y a los arquitectos en general, darles a conocer las posibilidades actuales en materia de SBIM y AR. The Call of Girona, its Jewish quarter, is one of the most important monumental assemblies of Catalonia and by its level of conservation, from across Europe. It characterized by their narrow alleys, heirs of the Roman plot of the Gerunda original, along with the remainder of the old helmet of the city, they configure themselves as the most important historic-urban center of Catalonia.
 
 The growing affluence of tourists, along with the successive improvement and ordering of the dwellings and singular buildings that configure the neighborhood, completely inhabited and full of life, is giving a series of urban development measures to improve the accessibility to the same one, at the same time that their residential use is consolidated and of equipment, by means of a regulation of special urban development protection. On the other hand this city has an extraordinary system of information online that permits to have all the urban cartography of the same one and even of a model of Virtual cartographic reconstruction developed by a team of experts under them you promote of the City Hall of Girona and the Museum of History of the City.
 
 Taking as environment this zone and information, the development of an investigation applied inside the environment of the architectural graphic expression is proposed, founded first in a work of analysis and study of the bibliographical, cartographic and historic sources in matter of historic-urban development of the zone and in second place, in a study of application of the modern techniques of representation SBIM Sketch Based Interface and Modeling and the Augmented Reality. Melting all these registrations and fields of work, the hypothesis is thrown that is possible to expand the plan of at present existing alleys by means of the cataloguing and lifting of two new alleys, that will call 1, or "d' Hernandez", that we propose to rename as that of the Last Synagogue and 2, or "De les Dones", to date only documented to level of location but that with our work of field and contribution has been seen that they are perfectly recoverable. 
 
 This recovery is undertaken in the investigation, by means of the visual simulation of the same using the techniques of SBIM and AR, before cited, of form combined and adapted to the specificities of the work and abilities of an architect-town planner, so that they develop a practical study cases series whose final objective is that a visitor, situated before the current entrance walled of the alley, by means of a device type Tablet PC connected to a webcam, can be get an idea of which would be the aspect of that alley, on the other hand inaccessible, given that at present is found walled. 
 
 This strategy of pre-viewing, should serve besides so that the designer can present the possible alternatives to his not always evident, physical recovery. In that sense and as the architects we propose an architectural solution in each case along with the information devices trial on the land that facilitate the accessibility to the different monuments and hereditary buildings of the historic center of Girona. On the other hand as educational of architectural graphic expression, we practice new strategic graphic that permit to promote the creativity and as a group to facilitate the investigators data processing data and experiences that permit to optimize the new tools and processes, and to the architects in general, to bring to light the current possibilities in matter of SBIM and AR.