Handshouse Studio was awarded a Mass Humanities Digital Capacity Grant to build a Gwozdziec Synagogue Project Interactive Archive/Virtual Tour!

It is hard to believe that ten years have already passed since the official start of the Gwoździec Synagogue Reconstruction Project! This landmark project offered Handshouse Studio the opportunity to bring together more than 350 participants to take part in accurately reconstructing the 17th century wooden synagogue timber roof structure and painted ceiling that is now on permanent display in the core exhibition of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland.

We are so grateful to mark this anniversary with a significant new effort to make decades of historic research more accessible to the general public.

With the support of a Mass Humanities, which recieves support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Handshouse Studio will create a website to house the Gwoździec Synagogue Project Interactive Archive/ Virtual Tour. The tour will start with a foundation of the gorgeous 3-D digital rendering of the Gwoździec Synagogue roof and ceiling that was made by Trillium Studio’s using Cary Wolinksy’s photographs in collaboration with Christopher Gaal and animation team of Crazybridge Studios. We will establish the initial phase of our virtual tour of the polychrome painted ceiling with a fly-through that gives viewers the opportunity to experience the complex imagery and architecture of the Gwodziec painted ceiling with both an intimacy of the close up details, as well as a critical sense of each images context of the architectural painting as a whole. We will also use this website portal to begin to contextualize the history of this cultural heritage, and share process and material research related to Gwoździec Synagogue and other 17th century wooden synagogues of the Polish Lithuantian Commonwealth.

Through our partnership with the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland, we hope that this archive will eventually offer both institutions the forum to expand and deepen the contextual resources about 17th century wooden synagogues with contributions from other notable historians, architects, scholars, craftspeople, and project participants. And it will offer Handshouse Studio a new tool to share our unique hands-on process of illuminating this history with a wider public.  

When the Gwoździec Synagogue Project began, we had no idea how many participants would lay hands on the effort, how many thousands would stand in awe under the painted ceiling, or how many would long to join us in reawakening this history through their own touch. What this project has taught us is that the generative act of exploring complex and difficult histories in a learning-by-doing approach can both invigorate an authentic love of learning, awaken lost cultural heritage that can only be rediscovered through physical action, and offer experiences to participants and spectators alike, that can be deeply healing, rejuvenating, and transformative.

There is a lot of interest for new models of education like the kind of interdisciplinary, hands-on approach embodied by Handshouse projects; projects that meet the hunger for STEAM curricula, arts-integrated project-based learning, and can offer innovative culturally inclusive approaches to teaching both histories of systemic oppression and stories of the remarkable cultural contributions made by oppressed communities, all while inspiring empathy and cultural understanding of self and others.

Through the Wooden Synagogue project, Handshouse Studio has produced a priceless archive of historical material research that is vital to the continued work of recovering lost heritage. We have also established a powerful educational model for learning. The demand for our research and access to our unique hands-on approach of the Gwoździec Synagogue Project-- as well as the many other Handshouse projects-- is leading us to explore new ways to expand our capacity to share our process and resources. We imagine that creating this digital archive will serve as an exciting new model for how we reach our participants with all our projects.

After years of successful workshops with college students at the national/international level, we are eager to be adapting our unique hands-on pedagogy for more kinds of learners. One key tool for making our projects more accessible will be creating tools like the Gwozdziec Synagogue Project Interactive Archive/Virtual Tour.