Samuel D. Gruber
By Samuel D. Gruber
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Culture The Rabbi’s Son Who Built Detroit
Scroll down for a slideshow featuring Kahn’s work. Albert Kahn is America’s forgotten architect — even though in his lifetime, he (and his firm) produced more buildings than any other architect, and his design and production method changed the face of the country. Eighty years before the bailout of the auto industry, just before the…
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Culture A 94-Foot Retelling of Jewish History
Throughout her career, artist Ruth Weisberg has preferred to make art in series, wrestling with subjects and producing multiple works that are thematically, formally and sometimes physically connected. A frequent theme is redemption — especially how a moral or physical danger or horror can transform into a redemptive act for those involved, and for those…
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Culture Rescuing Drohobych
Rubin Schmer is an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor with cancer, but right now he’s not thinking of his past or his future. What’s on his mind is the fate of the Jewish cemetery, the mass gravesite and synagogue in his native town of Drohobycz (now Drohobych, Ukraine). For the past three years, Schmer has been single-minded…
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Culture A Birthday Celebration for Curacao’s Historic Synagogue
As evening fell in Willemstad in Curacao on April 16, scores of well-dressed people headed to the narrow Hanchi di Snoa, and into the courtyard of the Snoa — Curacao’s venerable synagogue built in 1732, home to Congregation Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, the oldest surviving synagogue in the Americas, and one where no Sabbath or major holiday…
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News Restoring a Landmark Synagogue: If You Rebuild It, Will They Come?
It rained every day in Los Angeles when I visited recently, putting a damper on my plans to cruise the region while looking at new architecture. Somehow it’s easier to look at buildings in the rain in Syracuse, N.Y. (where I live), or in Central Europe, where I often work, than in Southern California, of…
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News Sidney Eisenshtat, 90, Leading Synagogue Architect
Sidney Eisenshtat, one of America’s leading synagogue architects, died March 1 in Los Angeles. He was 90 years old. Eisenshtat was a prolific architect in Southern California, and an influential architect of modern synagogues. He graduated from the University of Southern California ‘s School of Architecture in 1935 and maintained his architectural practice in Los…
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Culture At Syracuse University, Undulating Walls Commemorate Vanishing Barriers
In Syracuse, N.Y., artist Sol LeWitt has been building walls, while Nancy Cantor, the new chancellor of Syracuse University, has been breaking them down (figuratively speaking). Cantor, who was inaugurated last month as the 11th chancellor and president of the university, is the first woman and the first Jew to hold the position. Since her…
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Culture Built Judaism:
Architecture has been an important way in which Jews have defined themselves within their own community, as well as the pre-eminent means of projecting Jewish identity to the gentile world. Palaces of Prayer, a new exhibit at the Angel Orensanz Foundation on New York’s Lower East Side, includes 70 superb color prints of synagogues that…
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