Rudolf Klein’s photographs of synagogues in central Europe are exhibited in an exhibition associated with the Jewish Culture Festival that is part of European Cultural Capital events in Kosice, Slovakia.
The inaugural event is July 18.
From the exhibition web page:
This exhibition invites the visitor to follow a remarkable voyage of the Jews from the onset of the siècle de lumières, the Enlightenment, up to the darker times of World War II in some lands of East-Central Europe. This two-century-long voyage started in the remote shtetls (Jewish settlements) in the northern parts of the Habsburg Empire and today’s Poland or Ukraine, and continued to the major centres of the region with sojourns in the villages and townships or the market towns of what is today Poland, Ukraine Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia.
This journey of the Jews was far from being a pleasure trip in a homogeneous nation state. To begin with, the Habsburg Empire was a kind of commonwealth of different ethnicities, and of regions varying enormously in regard to culture, and geography as well as economically. Jews increasingly represented the unifying element, particularly from the Vormärz period, which promised the Jews civil rights. Secondly, Jews felt spurred on to move away from their heartlands in the north and to settle in the vast expanse of the Habsburg Lands and its neighbouring countries, where they encountered different regions, with sometimes more and sometimes less tolerant environments. Yet they were always impelled to change and adapt themselves to local circumstances. At the same time, they nurtured their ancient traditions, which helped them to bridge these distinct episodes into a ‘viewable film,’ in the framework of time, the leading thread of Jewish existence from its very beginnings.
Assimilating to nascent national cultures, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Croat, etc. offered the Jews the chance to stop, if not terminate, this constant wandering for a while, and to cast anchor. Hundreds and hundreds of synagogues played the architectural role of these anchors, and were an attempt to express the concept of the Jews belonging to a place. Domes and turrets rendered synagogues as landmarks in the villages, towns and cities of Habsburg Lands and its successor states until the Holocaust, reinforcing a Jewish presence in architectural-urban form. Ironically, many of these landmarks have survived, but the original intention failed: they no longer bear witness to Jewish existence.
The focus of this exhibition is the synagogue, as a pivot of Jewish spiritual and communal life, which itself underwent fundamental change from the 1760s to World War II. This exhibition partly covers the earlier periods for the sake of better understanding of modernization. While the exhibition is primarily about architecture, buildings serve as vehicles for conveying values, identity, dreams and the indescribable, which formed the core of Jewish existence in the Diaspora.