Willy Graf (from 1919 known as William Ritter von Graf) was a German architect based in Stuttgart. During World War I, Graf served in the Prussian army and was ennobled for his heroism. His firm Graf & Roeckle designed a number of notable buildings in Germany, including synagogues. He also designed a plaque honoring Jewish soldiers from Stuttgart who had fought in World War I. The august synagogue he designed in Mainz, erected on Hindenburgstrasse in 1911–1912, included a central, circular nave with a large dome and side wings housing a weekday synagogue, community rooms, wedding hall, and a Museum of Jewish Antiquities. It was looted and burned on Kristallnacht in 1938. Graf continued to live and work in Germany during the Nazi period and afterward.
He Cast a Look and Went Mad depicts traditional East European Jews in some sort of religious setting but invokes in its title the classic talmudic legend of the sage who “looked and was injured” when…
In this seventeenth-century map, Jerusalem is depicted as a fairly dense city within a wall, with only a few structures outside. Men in Arab dress stand in small groups conversing with one another in…
The kapporet is a short valance hung over the curtain of the Torah ark that first began to appear in Eastern Europe in the late seventeenth century. The griffins and crowns that appear on this kappore…