The architect Eric Mendelsohn was born in Allenstein, Germany. His earliest buildings were influenced by expressionism, but his style soon turned in a more linear direction. In Germany, he built strikingly modern department stores for Salman Schocken. When the Nazis came to power, he fled to England, where he was one of a handful of architects building in the internationalist style. In 1935, he opened an office in Jerusalem, and in 1939 he moved there. In Mandate Palestine, he did some of his best work; among the iconic buildings he designed were the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, Chaim Weizmann’s home in Rehovot, Salman Schocken’s home and library in Jerusalem, and the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Jerusalem. In 1941, he moved to San Francisco. While the synagogues he designed in his American years were modernist in style, they were less remarkable than his work in Germany and Palestine.
This alms box was affixed to the wall in the Old Synagogue (Alte-Schul, or Stara Bóżnica) of Kraków, located in the Kazimierz district of the city. Because it was in a part of the Polish-Lithuanian…
The Pinkas Synagogue is the second-oldest extant synagogue in Prague. It is believed that a synagogue was found in that location as early as 1492. The structure now housing the synagogue was founded…
In the 1930s, Lotte Errell and her husband, also a photographer, traveled the world, visiting countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The outbreak of war in 1939 found the now divorced and…