Silent Witnesses - Ellen Alt's Kol HaNeshama in Jerusalem

Every week we feature several artists' projects in our current exhibit Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt, or Left Behind - Artists Respond to History.

  

This is a collaborative art exhibit organized by the Cultural Heritage Artists Project, with the Jewish Art Salon,  JWalks and the Holocaust Memorial Center. February 22 - April 14 in Metro Detroit. Exhibit info here.

Ellen Alt -
Kehilat Kol Haneshama, Jerusalem: A Constant in a Changing Capitol
 
"My piece is an exploration of Jerusalem through the eyes of Kehilah Kol Haneshama (KKH), a progressive congregation in Baka/Geulim.  KKH was founded 25 years ago when Jerusalem, while diverse, was relatively integrated and prosperous.

The city has experienced many migrations in recent decades, becoming more divided between its Arab and Jewish populations, and has been the site of both intifadas and peace summits. There has been an exodus of its young, secular and middle-class residents as well as its Christian community.  Jerusalem has also welcomed a new wave of Muslim, Ethiopian and Russian immigrants, and Orthodox Jews.  As a result, observant programs and centers of learning have flourished.

Silent Witnesses - Susan Shender & James Stone Goodman

In our series on artists participating in our current exhibit Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt, or Left Behind, we focus this time on a team of collaborators from St. Louis: Susan Shender and James Stone Goodman.

 

Silent Witnesses is Collaborative Art Exhibit organized by the Cultural Heritage Artists Project, the Jewish Art Salon,  JWalks and the Holocaust Memorial Center. February 22 - April 14, 2012 at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Metro Detroit.

The Scrolls of the St. Louis South Side Congregation

In this project, influenced by talismanic and incantational Ethiopian scroll art, Goodman and Shender tell the story of a synagogue and two communities in three scrolls of poetry, prose, and visual imagery. Previously they collaborated on several projects exploring hybrid art forms including interior architecture, mosaics and story, Yemenite text preservation and story telling. They also created a small gallery in a synagogue space exploring the intersection of visual art, story, song, and performance.

The South Side Congregation project began with Goodman, a native of Detroit, who moved to St. Louis. Out of an experience with a found piece of synagogue stained glass, he came to know a community that was little documented in his new home. In 1995 he wrote the story of the glass window, the synagogue where it was once installed, the community that occupied the space, and the return of Jewish prayer to that space in a combination prose and poetry form. 

Silent Witnesses review in Detroit Jewish News

Silent Witnesses - Yona Verwer

Every week we feature several artists participating in our current exhibit Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt, or Left Behind - Artists Respond to History.

  

This art exhibit is organized by the Cultural Heritage Artists Project, in collaboration with the Jewish Art Salon, JWalks and the Holocaust Memorial Center. February 22 - April 14 in Metro Detroit. Exhibit info here.

Yona Verwer

A Cemetery Dodges the Wrecking Ball 

The 1967 Dodge is an homage to my parents in the Netherlands, car enthusiasts who often bought a vehicle made in the Chrysler factories of Detroit.

I produced this work influenced by Joan Roth, a photographer whose work I have admired for years. For generations Roth's family was affiliated with Congregation Shaarey Tzedek, which is now the caretaker of Beth Olem, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Michigan.  

My work is centered around this burial place, a religious site that has seen as much urban change as the community's synagogue buildings. At one time this cemetery was in a peaceful setting, but as the manufacturing plant of Dodge Chrysler expanded the cemetery became surrounded by an industrial parking lot. Eventually the Dodge plant closed, and without moving, the site is now located on the grounds of General Motors. Thanks to state laws Beth Olem Cemetery is restored and accessible to the public once a year. 

Silent Witnesses - Siona Benjamin

Every week we feature several artists participating in our current exhibit Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt, or Left Behind - Artists Respond to History.

  
This is an art exhibit organized by the Cultural Heritage Artists Project, in collaboration with the Jewish Art Salon, JWalks and the Holocaust Memorial Center. February 22 - April 14 in Metro Detroit. Exhibit info here.

Siona Benjamin

The Kadavumbhagam synagogue in Ernakulam, South India

3 frames 11" x 14" /one video photo frame 5" x 7"


The terrorist attack that occurred in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) on November 26-29, 2008 was a massacre of both resident Indians and visiting foreigners. These attacks brought notice to the world of the existence of a small but ancient group of Indian Jewish people that inhabited the Indian subcontinent for approximately 2,000 years.

I was brought up as a Bene Israel Jew in a predominately Hindu and Muslim India in Mumbai, and I was immensely disheartened by the lack of media and news coverage.  My American friends asked many questions. “Did Jews first inhabit India upon the establishment of the Chabad house?” “If not, then what did the local Jewish population look like? This dialogue with my friends was the impetus for this proposal.

Silent Witnesses - Julian Voloj

Every week we feature several artists participating in our current exhibit Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt, or Left Behind - Artists Respond to History.

  

This is an art exhibit organized by the Cultural Heritage Artists Project, in collaboration with the Jewish Art Salon, JWalks and the Holocaust Memorial Center. February 22 - April 14 in Metro Detroit. Exhibit info here.

Julian Voloj is one of the exhibit organizers.

Julian Voloj
Detroit Revisited
Suite of 9 Photographs 

Every year thousands of Americans visit Europe, searching for remnants of a once-thriving Jewish culture. Countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic, though their Jewish communities have nearly vanished, have become places of pilgrimage for Jewish heritage tourists. In the United States, however, while Jewish culture thrives American Jewish heritage is usually forgotten.

Silent Witnesses - Mel Alexenberg

Every week we feature several artists participating in our current exhibit Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt, or Left Behind - Artists Respond to History.

  

This is an art exhibit organized by the Cultural Heritage Artists Project, in collaboration with the Jewish Art Salon, JWalks and the Holocaust Memorial Center. February 22 - April 14 in Metro Detroit. Exhibit info here.

Mel Alexenberg
Bar Mitzvah in a Brooklyn Mosque

I was born in the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital (now Interfaith Hospital), celebrated my bar mitzvah in my Uncle Morris' synagogue at 1089 Coney Island Avenue (now a Pakistani mosque), and was married in the Park Manor Jewish wedding hall on Eastern Parkway (now an African-American Baptist church).

My Uncle Morris founded a storefront synagogue in Brooklyn that he named Congregation Beth Abraham for my father.  He was the rabbi of the congregation.  He lived in the two floors above the shul with his wife Dora (my mother's sister) and their six children.  My parents, my sister and I spent all the Jewish holidays in their house.  We had only to run down a flight of stairs to participate in the services.  

On the Sunday following my being called up to the Torah as a bar mitzvah on Shabbat, we celebrated with family and friends in Uncle Morris's shul as he sang with the accompaniment of a choir.  My parents sat with my sister and me in front the bima draped with an American flag. When my uncle retired, he sold 1089 Coney Island Avenue to a Hasidic group that later sold it to Muslims who redesigned the synagogue to serve as a mosque.    

Silent Witnesses - Miriam Benjamin

Every week we feature several artists participating in our current exhibit Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt, or Left Behind - Artists Respond to History.

  

This is an art exhibit organized by the Cultural Heritage Artists Project, in collaboration with the Jewish Art Salon, JWalks and the Holocaust Memorial Center. February 22 - April 14 in Metro Detroit. Exhibit info here.

Miriam Benjamin
My Synagogue Came on Aliyah

I came on aliyah in 1949 from my birthplace, Paramaribo, Suriname, when I was 9 years old.  60 years later, my synagogue followed me and came on aliyah. The Tzedek ve-Shalom synagogue established in 1736 on the northern coast of South America was dismantled and shipped to Israel and reconstructed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. My father, Moshe Yehuda Benjamin, chanted the Torah portion on Shabbat in the two synagogues in the Dutch colony, both the Tzedek ve-Shalom (Justice and Peace) Sephardi synagogue and the Neveh Shalom (House of Peace) Ashkenazi synagogue.  Neveh Shalom, established in 1735 and reconstructed in 1835, still stands in the center of Paramaribo next to a mosque built in 1984.

I rushed to be the first person in synagogue on Friday evenings after the sand floors were raked smooth so that my footprints would be the first to show.  Both synagogues had sand floors to symbolize the Diaspora wanderings of the Jewish people just as they wandered in the Sinai desert sands on their way to the Land of Israel.

Silent Witnesses - Martin Mendelsberg

Every week we feature several artists participating in our latest exhibit Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt, or Left Behind - Artists Respond to History.

  

This is a collaborative art exhibit organized by the Cultural Heritage Artists Project, the Jewish Art Salon,  JWalks and the Holocaust Memorial Center. February 22 - April 14 in Metro Detroit. Exhibit info here.

 Selections from the Reading Room

Martin Mendelberg's Selections from the Reading Room, Remnants is an old suitcase containing a collection of books and short stories detailing the lives of tuberculosis patients at the Jewish Consumptives’ Relief Society (JCRS) in Denver, Colorado. At the heart of the JCRS campus was the Isaac Solomon Synagogue, a modest and simple home that became the spiritual center for many of the practicing Jews as early as 1904.

Silent Witnesses - Ahron D. Weiner

The spotlight on artists participating in our latest exhibit

Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt, or Left Behind - Artists Respond to History falls on Ahron D. Weiner.

  

A Collaborative Art Exhibit organized by the Cultural Heritage Artists Project, the Jewish Art Salon,  JWalks and the Holocaust Memorial Center. February 22 - April 14 in Metro Detroit.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

A well-preserved Baroque-style synagogue–built in 1780–is the central feature of Luze, a small town in the Czech Republic. The building, which hosted religious services until the Nazi occupation, was converted to a leather tannery under Soviet rule. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the synagogue became what it remains today: a theater, and museum of regional theater, showcasing sets, costumes, and props from past productions. "Roman" helmets and armor, swords and shields, hang on the walls. A white, angel-winged cello dangles from the ceiling, above a poster advertising a 1966 performance of The Golem. 

Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt or Abandoned - Collaborative Art Exhibit with the Jewish Art Salon

Artists Respond to History

Holocaust Memorial Center
28123 Orchard Lake Road
Farmington Hills, MI 48334 (Metro Detroit)

Hours: Sun - Thurs 9:30 AM – 5:00 PM, Fri 9:30 AM – 3:00 PM 

Tel: (248) 553-2400.
 

“Silent Witnesses” is a collaboration of the Cultural Heritage Artists Project,  the Jewish Art Salon, JWalks, and the Holocaust Memorial Center. All of the works in this exhibit are being shown for the first time. 

On February 20th, 2012, the innovative new exhibition Silent Witnesses: Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt or Abandoned opens at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

The 23 participating artists explore the intersection of community migration and Jewish heritage by researching abandoned synagogues throughout the United States, Europe, India and Israel, and creating paintings, photographs, installations and videos woven from the stories of the historic spaces.  

With this exhibition, the Cultural Heritage Artists Project continues its pioneering work in developing an innovative model of artist initiated and organized exhibitions, based on the belief that by working together around a shared theme artists can create new works with meaning, while engaging in an artistic dialogue that encourages new aesthetic explorations.

As the world of the artist expands beyond the narrow confines of the art market, we are seeking a way to create exhibitions from the ground up that involve artists as creative thinkers. We wanted to stimulate artistic discourse within the community, not discourage artists by burying them under a mound of proposal writing and other paperwork.

We gave artists a topic and time to research this topic, think about the topic in new and inventive ways, and then to make new work emerging from their own artistic process. 

Artists have always shared work in development with other artists.  Thirty years ago, we shared studio space.  Today, we can supplement that sharing with the internet.  For this project, we used a private website where artists' first ideas, and then works in progress, and finally finished pieces were available to other artists to view. What emerged - and what we hope will continue to develop for the next time - is a shared sense of invention. 

The inclusion of scholarly essays in this publication is central to our mission.  We are engaging topics.  We have insights, we have ideas, we have ways to illuminate. 

Working with the Holocaust Memorial Center in Detroit has opened a meaningful exchange of ideas.  How do we display history, how do we make the past accessible?  

Participating artists: Mel Alexenberg, Ellen Alt, Aileen Bassis, Miriam Benjamin, Siona Benjamin, Edith C. Dreikurs, Camille Eskel, James Stone Goodman, Rachel Kanter, Stacy Leeman, Martin Mendelsberg, Jacob Mezrahi, Joan Roth, Cynthia Beth Rubin, Ben Schachter, Susan Shender, Linda Soberman, Miriam Stern, Saul Sudin, Julian Voloj, Yona Verwer, Ahron Weiner and Todd Weinstein.

Catalog essays by Samuel D. Gruber, Ruth Ellen Gruber, Stephen M. Goldman, Deborah Kovsky-Apap, and Aaron Rosen.

Exhibit organizers: 
Cynthia Beth Rubin - Cultural Heritage Artists Project
Yona Verwer - Jewish Art Salon
Julian Voloj - JWalks
Linda Soberman

More info: http://culturalheritageartistsproject.org/chap2/chap-two.html

Silent Witnesses: Julian Voloj

The Jewish Art Salon is a proud collaborator in the exhibit Silent Witnesses: Migration stories through Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt, or Left Behind.


The story of Detroit is the inspiration for this artists project and exhibition on how synagogues, as community institutions, stand as witness to the social upheavals of our time.


Conceived and sponsored by Cynthia Beth Rubin of the Cultural Heritage Artists Project, Julian Voloj of JWalks: Retracing Jewish Heritage and Yona Verwer of the Jewish Art Salon, this exhibition was initiated as a team effort and coordinated by participating artists. It will take place February and March 2012 at The Holocaust Memorial Center, Zekelman Family Campus in Farmington Hills, Metro Detroit, Michigan. More info on the exhibit here.


We will focus on several artists in the exhibit, starting with Julian Voloj. His project for this exhibit is titled: Forgotten Heritage - Uncovering Detroit’s Hidden Jewish Past.