by Carly Rothman/The Star-Ledger Monday December 29, 2008 For more than a year, George Greene and his wife labored daily over a lightbox in the basement of their Caldwell home, painstakingly fitting bits of colored glass together like a jigsaw puzzle. Panel by panel, the images emerged: Noah’s ark, a menorah, symbols for each of …
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Daniel Hillel Freelander From Reform Judaism, Fall 1994Reprinted with permission. Reform synagogue architecture in America has from the beginning followed artistic trends and architectural norms. Jewish immigrants from Central Europe, who erected their community’s first and second synagogues between the 1840s and 1930s, sought to win the respect and admiration of their non-Jewish neighbors by …
Yaacov Agam, a maser of kinetic art and the son of a rabbi, has pioneered a form of visual art influenced by the Jewish conception that reality is not static and cannot be represented in a graven image. His images are in a state of “constant becoming” — they cannot be seen in their totality …
Written and illustrated by Yaacov Agam From Reform Judaism, Fall 1994 Reprinted with permission. What is the function of the synagogue, and does the architecture meet the needs of the worshipers? After considering these questions for many years, I have concluded sadly that the architectural organization of most synagogues inhibits rather than enhances the spiritual …