www.woodensynagogue.org
A New Website to House a Wooden Synagogue Project Interactive Archive
It is hard to believe that ten years have already passed since the installation of the Gwoździec Synagogue Reconstruction. 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.
Group painting the many elements in the Cove of the Gwozdzeic ceiling painting at the workshop at the White Synagogue in Sejny, Poland in 2012
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 Grant, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Handshouse Studio has created a new website; A Portal to Gwoździec, to house the Wooden Synagogue Project Interactive Archive. The website is just the start of a new chapter of the Wooden Synagogue project; one that seeks to offer a digital portal to an interactive archive of material research related to Gwoździec Synagogue and other 17th century wooden synagogues of the Polish Lithuantian Commonwealth. We see this as a new kind of Handshouse project that is using the model-buidling capacity of 21st century technologies to offer us the capacity to illuminate a complex archive of cultural heritage.
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 MAKING/HISTORY: Wooden Synagogue Project, Handshouse Studio produced a priceless archive of historical material research that is vital to the continued work of further research and recovery of 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 demonstrated in 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 many of 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 A Portal to Gwoździec.
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 we believe it will offer Handshouse Studio a new tool to share our unique hands-on process of illuminating this history with a wider public.
One way this project has already begun to do just that is through collaboration with the Jewish Arts Collaborative, a Boston-based non-profit whose mission is to harness the transformative power of Jewish arts. We worked together with them through their new initiative Kolture; an interactive web resource with the aim to inspire a more connected, engaged, and tolerant world. Kolture helped ampliphy A Portal to Gwoździec to new audiences through a week long series of media blast, announcing the website launch through their networks.
The new chapter of the project has only just begin. We have more questions than answers at this point, more collaborations with more talented visionaries to make, and more models to draft and explore. As Rick Brown was known to say for a decade of work on the wooden synagogue project before there was any idea of its destination at the POLIN, “we don’t know where this all leading, but just watch…and we’ll see.”
Jason Loik and Rick Brown installing the Bimah under the painted ceiling at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2013.