Forward.com

The Rabbi's Son Who Built Detroit

By Samuel D. Gruber

Albert Kahn is America’s forgotten architect — even though in his lifetime, he (and his firm) produced more buildings than any other architect, and his design and production method changed the face of the country. Eighty years before the bailout of the auto industry, just before the Great Depression, Kahn built the most opulent of Detroit’s new corporate skyscrapers — the Art Deco-style Fisher Building. Facing the GM headquarters, Kahn’s grandest expression of civic architecture defined the unique American union of commercial and civic identityRead More

---

A 94-Foot Retelling of Jewish History

By Samuel D. Gruber

Throughout her career, artist Ruth Weisberg has preferred to make art in series, wrestling with subjects and producing multiple works that are thematically, formally and sometimes physically connected. A frequent theme is redemption — especially how a moral or physical danger or horror can transform into a redemptive act for those involved, and for those who witness. “I feel very strongly that memory is redemptive,” Weisberg recently told me, “and an artist’s making art is a redemptive act.”Read More

---

Rescuing Drohobych

By Samuel D. Gruber

Rubin Schmer is an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor with cancer, but right now he’s not thinking of his past or his future. What’s on his mind is the fate of the Jewish cemetery, the mass gravesite and synagogue in his native town of Drohobycz (now Drohobych, Ukraine). For the past three years, Schmer has been single-minded in his dedication. He has traveled to Poland and Ukraine — even in a wheelchair — to move the project forward. He has been indefatigable and remarkably successful in his quest to get this job done. But there is still much to do, and Rubin feels that time is running out for him and for the legacy of Drohobych’s once-flourishing Jewish community.Read More

---

A Birthday Celebration for Curacao’s Historic Synagogue

By Samuel D. Gruber

As evening fell in Willemstad in Curacao on April 16, scores of well-dressed people headed to the narrow Hanchi di Snoa, and into the courtyard of the Snoa — Curacao’s venerable synagogue built in 1732, home to Congregation Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, the oldest surviving synagogue in the Americas, and one where no Sabbath or major holiday has gone uncelebrated in 275 years. Inside, through the arched entrance portal with the inscription from Psalm 26 “B’makhelim abarekh Adonai” (“In the congregations I will bless the Lord”), all 144 candles were burning in the three large chandeliers and the sconces attached to the four big columns. The great columns recall those in the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, the “mother” congregation of Curacao’s Jews, who first settled “on the island” in 1651, making Willemstad the oldest surviving Jewish community in the Western hemisphere. These columns have added significance, for when the Snoa was built these were dedicated to the four Matriarchs — an unusual but prescient nod to the strength of the women of the Curacao community.Read More

---

Restoring a Landmark Synagogue: If You Rebuild It, Will They Come?

By Samuel D. Gruber

It rained every day in Los Angeles when I visited recently, putting a damper on my plans to cruise the region while looking at new architecture. Somehow it’s easier to look at buildings in the rain in Syracuse, N.Y. (where I live), or in Central Europe, where I often work, than in Southern California, of whose sun I dream. SoRead More

---