Wołpa Synagogue on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
The Wołpa Synagogue was a
The main hall was 13 meters by 12.80 meters with a vaulted ceiling described by art historians Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka as having been "the most magnificent of all known wooden ceilings" in Europe. Of course, since Christians were free to build with brick and stone, few European buildings of the scale of the Wolpa synagogue were ever built in wood. The walls of the main hall were 7.2 meters high. The vaulting, under a three-tiered roof, rose to a height of fourteen meters in three tiers marked by fancy balustrades. Each tier was made up of several curving sections faced in wooden paneling to form a graceful, tiered and vaulted dome. The vaulted ceiling was supported by the four wooden corner columns that rose from the bimah, and by trusses in the roof.
The Torah Ark was an elaborate, multi-tiered confection in painted, carved wood, with columns, bas-relief menorahs, vases, floral swags, roofed towers, the tablets of the Ten Commandments and an eagle.
In the early nineteenth century, the vaulted ceiling was painted in a "dark sapphire" color spangled with "glistening" gold stars. The walls were painted in naive Trompe-l'œil style to resemble a Classical masonry building. Polish Jewish communities were routinely denied permission to build in masonry.Rachel Wischnitzer, ''The Architecture of the European Synagogue'', JPS, Philadelphia, 1964, p. 127
The exterior featured a three-tiered roof and a pair of elaborate corner pavilions with two-tiered roofs over elaborate vaulted ceilings.
In 1997, the Yiddish Book Center on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, the world's largest repository of Yiddish books and literature, chose to model its building on existing photographs of the Wolpa Synagogue.
In 2015, an exact replica of Wolpa Synagogue was built in Biłgoraj, Poland.
The synagogue of Wołpa
Virtual Shtetl 2010
Wooden Synagogue in Voupa (Volpa, Wołpa), Belarus
in the Bezalel Narkiss Index of JEwish Art, the
The Wołpa Synagogue was a synagogue
A synagogue, ', 'house of assembly', or ', "house of prayer"; Yiddish: ''shul'', Ladino: or ' (from synagogue); or ', "community". sometimes referred to as shul, and interchangeably used with the word temple, is a Jewish house of worshi ...
located in the town of Voŭpa
Vowpa ( be, Воўпа; pl, Wołpa; russian: Вольпа, Volpa; lt, Volpos) is an agrotown in Vawkavysk District, Grodno Region, Belarus.Carol Herselle Krinsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985, ''Synagogues of Europe: Architect ...
, in what is now western Belarus.Carol Herselle Krinsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985, ''Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning'', Dover Publications, 1996, p. 225 ff. It was reputed to be the "most beautiful" of the wooden synagogues of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
Wood is a porous and fibrous structural tissue found in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants. It is an organic materiala natural composite of cellulose fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin tha ...
, a "masterwork" of wooden vernacular architecture.Thomas C. Hubka, ''Resplendent Synagogue: Architecture and Worship in an Eighteenth Century Polish Community'', by Brandeis University Press, 2003, p. 63
History
The synagogue was built in the first half of the eighteenth century, and altered in minor ways several times.Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka, Heaven’s Gate: Wooden Synagogues in the Territory of the Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences, Wydawnnictwo Krupski I S-ka, Warsaw, 2004, p. 362-70 In 1929 the building was listed as a Polish Monument of Culture. It was burnt by the Germans during the Second World War.Architecture
The main hall was 13 meters by 12.80 meters with a vaulted ceiling described by art historians Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka as having been "the most magnificent of all known wooden ceilings" in Europe. Of course, since Christians were free to build with brick and stone, few European buildings of the scale of the Wolpa synagogue were ever built in wood. The walls of the main hall were 7.2 meters high. The vaulting, under a three-tiered roof, rose to a height of fourteen meters in three tiers marked by fancy balustrades. Each tier was made up of several curving sections faced in wooden paneling to form a graceful, tiered and vaulted dome. The vaulted ceiling was supported by the four wooden corner columns that rose from the bimah, and by trusses in the roof.
The Torah Ark was an elaborate, multi-tiered confection in painted, carved wood, with columns, bas-relief menorahs, vases, floral swags, roofed towers, the tablets of the Ten Commandments and an eagle.
In the early nineteenth century, the vaulted ceiling was painted in a "dark sapphire" color spangled with "glistening" gold stars. The walls were painted in naive Trompe-l'œil style to resemble a Classical masonry building. Polish Jewish communities were routinely denied permission to build in masonry.Rachel Wischnitzer, ''The Architecture of the European Synagogue'', JPS, Philadelphia, 1964, p. 127
The exterior featured a three-tiered roof and a pair of elaborate corner pavilions with two-tiered roofs over elaborate vaulted ceilings.
In 1997, the Yiddish Book Center on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, the world's largest repository of Yiddish books and literature, chose to model its building on existing photographs of the Wolpa Synagogue.
In 2015, an exact replica of Wolpa Synagogue was built in Biłgoraj, Poland.
References
External links
The synagogue of Wołpa
Virtual Shtetl 2010
Wooden Synagogue in Voupa (Volpa, Wołpa), Belarus
in the Bezalel Narkiss Index of JEwish Art, the
Center for Jewish Art
Center or centre may refer to:
Mathematics
*Center (geometry), the middle of an object
* Center (algebra), used in various contexts
** Center (group theory)
** Center (ring theory)
* Graph center, the set of all vertices of minimum eccentricity ...
, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; he, הַאוּנִיבֶרְסִיטָה הַעִבְרִית בִּירוּשָׁלַיִם) is a public research university based in Jerusalem, Israel. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Dr. Chaim Weiz ...
{{coord, 53.3644, 24.3657, display=title
Wooden synagogues
Synagogues in Belarus
18th-century synagogues