Benefit Lunch with Bertha Kalich

This silver, repoussé, punched, engraved, and cast Torah shield, decorated with flowers and bunches of grapes, from Metz, France, is inscribed in Hebrew: C[rown of] T[orah]; Festival of Shavuot.

There were once hundreds of wooden synagogues in Poland and Lithuania, but only a very few examples of this particularly Jewish form of architecture have survived. The Zabłudów synagogue, built around…