From absence to living memory.
How it began
The Synagogue Project began on the streets of Europe. In town after town, the places where great synagogues once stood are marked, if at all, by a small plaque on a wall or a patch of grass between apartment blocks. Many of those plaques are faded or forgotten, and some have been defaced with graffiti. Often nothing remains to show that a Jewish community lived there for hundreds of years.
Standing in front of those plaques is a sobering experience. They record an ending, not a life. The communities that built these synagogues, prayed and studied in them, married in them and raised their children around them are gone, and in most of these towns there is no one left to remember them by name.
I came away with a simple conviction: these communities deserve more than a plaque. Their memory should be carried somewhere it can be lived, not only mourned: in a place where Jews are safe to gather openly, and where their synagogues will be cared for rather than defaced.
What I am doing now
The first work is documentary: identifying significant destroyed synagogues, assembling reliable histories, and preserving their architectural record in one accessible place.
Every entry in the catalogue brings together the building’s history, its architecture, the people connected to it, the story of its destruction and what stands on the site today, with sources for each. Wherever possible I gather photographs, postcards and plans, many of them shared by families and archives.
What I hope to build
The larger ambition is constructive. In time, The Synagogue Project aims to support faithful reconstructions in Israel—not as static replicas, but as functioning synagogues for communities that will pray, gather, learn, and celebrate within them.
Each rebuilt synagogue would carry the name and story of the town it came from. Families with roots in that community could visit it, and those who pray there would know whose memory they are continuing. A community destroyed in Europe would have a living home in Israel.
Reconstruction cannot undo destruction. It can, however, turn memory toward Jewish continuity.
