Józef Awin

Born near Habsburg Lemberg/Lwów (today L’viv, Ukraine), Józef Awin became an influential architect, artist, conservationist, and theorist of art. He promoted ideas of a new East European Jewish architecture inspired by the forms and decorations of seventeenth–eighteenth-century wooden and masonry synagogues. His work and that of his architectural firm, which included the Jewish Students’ House in what was then Lwów (1908–1909), private homes, and even designs for tombstones, was also influenced by other art trends: early on, art nouveau and, in the 1920s and 1930s, art deco and Constructivism. He played a leading role in the establishment of the Committee for the Protection of Jewish Art Monuments under the Jewish Community in Lwów in 1925. Awin was murdered in the Holocaust, dying in the Janowska labor camp. His reconstruction of the synagogue in the Old Cemetery of Lwów/L’viv, featured here, reflect his clean geometricity and appreciation for Galician wooden synagogue architecture.