American synagogues are closing at a record rate. This retired judge is rescuing their stained glass windows.
Inside a Chicago synagogue, retired judge Jerry Orbach has built a refuge for the stained glass of America’s vanishing Jewish communities
Stained Glass
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The Schmooze Britain’s Stained Glass Master
“Life and Art Through Stained Glass,” a new exhibit at the Ben Uri Gallery in London, examines the artistic career of architect, painter, designer and stained glass innovator Roman Halter (1927-2012). A survivor of the Holocaust, Halter channeled much of his creativity into narrating the horrors of that experience. It was essential to him that…
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Culture Through Stained Glass, Brightly
If you were to poll the average American Jewish man and woman on the street about what constitutes normative American synagogue architecture, stained glass windows would probably be the very last thing that comes to mind. Some folks might be quick to conjure an image of an elaborately decorated Moorish-like interior; others, jokingly, might bring…
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The Schmooze Jean-Jacques Duval’s Connecticut Synagogue Stained Glass Still Dazzles After 50 Years
Crossposted from Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art & Monuments In 2009 I wrote an article for Tablet Magazine about Abstract Expressionist artist Adolph Gottlieb’s stained glass windows in the Kingsway Jewish Center in Brooklyn (this article has just been republished, without slide show, in a special Shavuot synagogue issue of The New York Jewish Week). I…
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Life The Synagogue as a Veiled Woman
The Museum at Eldridge Street, a Lower East Side synagogue that was built in 1887 and holds National Historic Landmark status, recently underwent a quarter-century-long renovation, which culminated with the recent installment of a 16-foot glass window — see it here designed by artist Kiki Smith and architect Deborah Gans. The synagogue, long an Orthodox congregation…
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