The Chernivtsi Museum of the History and Culture of Bukovinian Jews
„How Goodly Are Thy Tents, O Jacob…“
„How Goodly Are Thy Tents, O Jacob…“
Wall Paintings in Bukovinian Synagogues
Chernivtsi-Kyiv 2016
Synagogue wall paintings in Bukovina:
ORIGINALITY IN THE CONTEXT OF TRADITIONS
The history of Eastern European synagogue painting, which has left traces in Bukovinian synagogues, extends over four centuries. Originating in what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late sixteenth century, it saw its heyday in the eighteenth century when it spread from the Dnieper River to the Rhine and from the Baltic Sea to the Danube [Fig. 1]. At the turn of the twentieth century, following the immigration of Jews to Palestine and America, it was introduced to other parts of the world. During the interwar and, especially, the post-war period, the physical elimination of the Jews, as well as the strengthening of political regimes professing militant atheism, together with a large-scale emigration, made it impossible for the remaining Jewish communities to return to their traditional ways, and the practice of wall painting came to an end. Nor did it take root in the New World as the transformations that were underway in the Eastern European Jewish immigrant communities came into conflict with the ideology and aesthetics embodied in traditional synagogue painting - art that became symbolic of the mentality of an Eastern European shtetl* [Transliteration of Hebrew terms and names conforms to modern Israeli phonology.] with its strong folklore and mystic core.
Today, it is difficult to appreciate the scale and forms of this artistic phenomenon, which is inseparable from Eastern European Yidishkait. Its special significance owes to its profoundly spiritual content and the combination of faith and liturgy, mysticism and folklore with the European experience. Synagogue wall painting became a vivid and original form of the visualization of the Jewish „picture of the world“. Magical symbols and representations of the biblical past and the Messianic future envelop the synagogue walls like a single artistic shroud turning the prayer hall into a visible Jewish Cosmos, where everything was as sacred as it was symbolic. It was there that the Almighty revealed himself to the Jews and they could lament their exile, galut, in their prayers, and dream about their return to Eretz Israel.
