The painter Hans Feibusch was born into a nonobservant Jewish home in Frankfurt am Main. After studying in Munich, Berlin, and Paris, he settled in Frankfurt. When the Nazis came to power, he fled to England. The experience of exile strongly influenced his work, as, for example, in his painting 1939. Beginning in the 1940s, he won wide acclaim for his murals in Anglican churches, executing projects in thirty churches in all. In 1965, he was baptized into the Church of England but in his nineties he abandoned Christianity and on his death was buried in a Jewish cemetery.
These small Torah finials, decorated with silver repoussé and dark and light blue enamel, originated in Persia. They are further adorned with slender flowers and graceful geometric patterns.
In designing this synagogue, Alschuler drew on photographs of the remains of a second-century Byzantine synagogue in Tiberias. He wrote that he designed the synagogue “not in sense of slavish…