An old card catalogue stands in the Jewish Theological Seminary library—a behemoth from the pre-digital past. But with many of its drawers filled with abstract wooden forms by the artist Tobi Kahn, it has been transformed. Carved wooden reliefs evocative of ancient ruins are set within this tactile cabinet of knowledge, while other drawers overflow ...

There is no shortage of synagogues in Brooklyn. Many are beautiful and some are unusual, but most are unknown except to their congregants. In order to help protect this heritage of often aging religious buildings, the New York Landmarks Conservancy embarked in 2006 on a project to survey them.
As a result, several synagogues have been ...

In advance of Sukkot, we reached out to architects and designers and asked for contemporary reimaginings of the sukkah. Susan Shender first came to our attention as the creator of the SukkahSoul sukkah, a delicate yet sturdy construction inspired, in part, by the sefirot of kabbalah. In this sketch, she offers a sukkah held together ...

Nationwide, the Sukkot holiday and the sukkah building type are undergoing something of a renaissance. Just as tent imagery captured the imagination of Jews building suburban synagogues in the 1960s, reflecting their continuing exodus from the “old neighborhoods,” so the simple form, temporary nature, and domestic setting of the humble sukkah strikes a sympathetic chord ...

Editor’s note: In advance of Sukkot, we reached out to architects and designers and asked for contemporary reimaginings of the sukkah. Charles and Julian Boxenbaum, the father-and-son duo behind BUZstudios, first came to our attention with their deliciously innovative Rugelah chair. Now, they’ve delighted us yet again—this time with their portable SukkahSeat. What follows is ...

It was the first week in September, and in cowboy boots and jeans, camera slung over my shoulder, I crunched through the springy thick tangle of undergrowth that carpets the old Jewish cemetery in Radauti, a market town in the far north of Romania, near the Ukrainian border. Around me stretched the crowded, ragged rows ...

Central to the Days of Awe in modern times is the experience of walking into the synagogue to find tall stacks of High Holiday prayer books, or mahzorim.
Things were not always thus. For centuries, Jewish prayer was an oral tradition, said from memory. Even as authoritative liturgies were codified, most didn’t have access to texts. ...

“Reinventing Ritual,” the title of the Jewish Museum’s fall exhibition, sounds like a talmudic paradox. Rituals are inflexible, repetitive, established, prescribed. How do they mesh with the often secular, quintessentially American concept of “reinvention”?
As it turns out, the museum is really talking about resuscitating, rather than reinventing, ritual—carving out a place for it in contemporary ...

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The story of one of the greatest coups in the history of book collecting began, as it happens, with a mistake. In 1956, an industrial diamond dealer and bibliophile named Jack Lunzer convinced a guard at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to let him leaf through several early Hebrew books ...

Louis Kahn may be the best known Jewish American architect. Among practicing architects and critics he is certainly the most revered. Though not traditionally religious, nor affiliated with any synagogue, Kahn identified with being a Jew—in a way inevitable for almost any immigrant of his generation. Born in Estonia in 1901, he immigrated to America ...