Review: Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture by Joseph Siry; Eric Mendelsohn’s Park Synagogue: Architecture and Community by Walter C. Leedy Jr. and Sara Jane Pearman

Abstract

Joseph Siry Beth Sholom Synagogue: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 736 pp., 10 color and 295 b/w illus. $70 (cloth), ISBN 9780226761404 Walter C. Leedy Jr. and Sara Jane Pearman Eric Mendelsohn’s Park Synagogue: Architecture and Community Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2012, 192 pp., 59 b/w illus. $45 (cloth), ISBN 9781606350850 Beginning in the late 1940s, a number of Jewish intellectuals and organizations began to focus attention on Jewish art and architecture, raising the questions: How could the synagogue building better express contemporary American Judaism? What was the role, if any, of historical architectural tradition? Prominent commentators like art historian Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein and architect Percival Goodman noted that, although an ancient building type, the synagogue has never developed a characteristic form or style. The reasons for such an absence of uniformity are many, including the Jews’ peripatetic existence, laws prohibiting land ownership, the synagogue’s egalitarian nature and its multivalent role, and the desire to assimilate. The lack of architectural traditions led designers to borrow and adapt from what they saw around them, including mosques in the Middle East and Christian churches in the West. Greek-, Byzantine-, and Moorish-styled synagogues predominated in Europe, and immigrants brought these traditions with them to the United States. Both Wischnitzer-Bernstein and Goodman proposed modernist architecture as a fruitful new direction, emphasizing its functionalism and freedom from historical associations. Two of America’s most famous synagogues, both constructed in the 1950s and both explorations in the modernist style, are the subjects of recent books of varying depth. As its title indicates, Joseph Siry’s Beth Sholom Synagogue , from the Sacred Landmarks series published by the University of Chicago Press, is about more than Frank Lloyd Wright’s Beth Sholom synagogue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania (1954–59). The story of that commission and design is the culmination of six initial chapters that provide context for Wright’s ideas about modern synagogue design. Siry begins his book by examining the relationship between Judaism and Chicago’s liberal Unitarians (led by Wright’s uncle the Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones), focusing on the ways in which Wright’s view of Judaism was colored by the Unitarian engagement with …