When the Kibbutz Lavi Furniture Company agreed to adopt recovery paintings in a synagogue in Germany, what they did not know was that their own kibbutz members were direct descendants of the Rav of the synagogue.
Seeing the impressive grandeur of the beautifully restored Carlebach synagogue in Lonbeck, Germany, is bittersweet, as neither Shul’s Rav nor any other member of the original network is alive to revel in the restored glory of the synagogue; however, in an attractive twist, many of the Rav’s young grandchildren are the youngsters of the founding members of the Kibbutz Lavi, whose furniture factory designed and built the Aron Kodesh, Bimah and others synagogues of Klei Kodesh.
Rabbi David Alexander Winter, Rav of the Carlebach Synagogue, fled the town in 1938 with the maximum of his community.Several months later, in Kristallnacht, when many German synagogues were lit and lit in the chimney, the synagogue of Lubeck was broken and looted, but fortunately not destroyed: the construction had recently been sold to the municipality and the contract, signed through the Rav, inside the synagogue in sight.For Rav Winter’s grandchildren, seeing the recovery of his grandfather’s synagogue is touching.”It’s a feeling of completing the circle,” said Yehudit Menachem, who visited Lubeck last year to be more informed about the history of his circle of relatives.Dr. Ariel Romem, a pediatrician and one of the grandchildren, noted that the recovery of the synagogue is a symbol of the resurgence of Winter’s circle of relatives and the other Jewish people as a whole.”They could have ruined the synagogue, but they never controlled to break us,” he said.In the seven decades since the Holocaust, the once majestic synagogue, established in 1880, suffered looting, chimney bombs, squatters and general negligence.
The German architect Thomas Schroder-Berkentien began working on recovery as early as 2010, but the task stalled due to a lack of investment.In 2016, the German government committed a considerable amount, with other investments from the state of Schleswig-Holstein, the Lubeck-based Possehl Foundation and UNESCO, which had declared the Old City of Lubeck a world heritage site.The total cost of the allocation amounted to almost $10 million.
Schroeder-Berkentien made the decision to locate the most productive craftsmen for the furniture of the synagogue, and also considered that it was quite general that the furniture came from Israel.He discovered the Lavi furniture factory online and after several consultations and a stopover in the carpentry workshop with his team, he trusted that they had the delight and experience to conduct the studies and produce quality and good looking items.In its 60 years of operation, the Lavi Furniture Factory has designed and produced synagogue interiors in more than 6,000 Jewish communities around the world, adding new and restored synagogues in Germany.
Motti Namdar, the factory’s leading planner, describes the challenge and utmost satisfaction of creating replicas of the original items. “We only had 3 black and white photographs from before the war to go through,” he explained. “The images showed only one angle and even that was not very clear. It is difficult to distinguish many of the details or what metals were used, especially for the Aron Kodesh, which you can see in the images is very unusual. “
In the end, many of Namdar’s paintings had to be done through the deduction and wisdom of the history of that period.”I went to the synagogue to see the synagogue and read about the parts that had not been damaged.Part of the women’s gallery.” The architect had hired recovery experts who conscientiously got rid of the layers of paint on the walls, exposing the original murals.The synagogue as a whole had been built in Moruno taste and I proceeded in that direction.
In one of the photos, it is imaginable to distinguish the pointed ceiling-shaped design in the most sensitive Aron Kodesh, which Namdar designed to come with 1500 “scales”, all covered in natural gold.Under Namdar’s leadership, the Lavi plant finished all the pieces before the deadline.”The hardest component was not the tight calendar, but the design of everything so that it can be dismantled, packaged and shipped, then reassembled so that everything fits perfectly.”
But while it was transparent to Lavi’s artisans seeking to produce replicas as original as possible, the project’s architect, Schr’der-Berkentien, intended that the design itself, which had been restored as a national monument, served as a testament, and in his words, “as a wound,” serving as a painful reminder of the occasions of 1939.This was the reasoning of his resolve not to remake the original ornate facade of the synagogue, which, along with the dome and other elements, had been destroyed in Kristallnacht.”The undeniable red brick tells the story of what happened,” he said.”A reconstructed facade would forget about this component of the tale, without the suffering of the time appearing.This is what makes it such an exclusive monument among other German synagogues.
When the news of the coronavirus pandemic was first announced in January, the plant began working overtime to put everything in position for the gala reopening, attended by senior German officials, adding Chancellor Angela Merkel, members of the recovery.committees and figures of the local network. Array, as well as Rav Winter’s grandchildren from Lavi’s kibyetz.However, when it was despite all the time to put the furniture together and install, the world was in a locked POSITION COVID-19.Possibly, Lavi Furniture Industries sent its own experts from England to complete the work.Now the synagogue is in all its shining splendor; however, the rite was postponed indefinitely.
The point is that the synagogue be open and operational, serving as a non-secular center for Lonbeck’s 700-member Jewish network.”This synagogue is not only a position of prayer, but a symbol of the rebirth of Jewish life in total Germany and the world,” said present-day Rav de Lonbeck, Rabbi Nathan Grinberg.
Printed from: https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/magazine/israeli-kibbutz-restores-carlebach-synagogue-in-lubeck-germany/2020/08/31/
Scan this QR code to this online page: