Those researching in Eastern Europe, particularly in the regions of Lithuania, will be interested to learn of a fascinating new film documentary, The Lost Wooden Synagogues of Eastern Europe, underwritten by the Florida Atlantic University Libraries, Boca Raton, Florida.

For hundreds of years prior to World War II, the Jews of rural Europe built wooden synagogues, perhaps one thousand in all, from the abundant local forests. These marvels of indigenous craftsmanship and artistic expression were burned, along with ancient manuscripts, village records, and religious and cultural artifacts, in Hitler's campaign to obliterate Jewish life and culture.

Albert Barry, a retired photojournalist, has been fascinated by the synagogues and the culture surrounding them for much of his adult life. In an effort to commemorate this lost art, Barry began his own campaign to preserve the memory of the structures and the people who erected and inhabited them by constructing miniature reproductions of the destroyed synagogues. These miniatures are on permanent exhibit in the Judaica Collections of Florida Atlantic University Library, Boca Raton, FL.

For decades the world believed that all of these buildings were lost. Then, a few years ago, a team from Hebrew University discovered six of these structures in Lithuania. Last year, under the auspices of the Molly S. Fraiberg Judaica Collections of the FAU Libraries, and thanks to the generous patronage of Nathan Crosby and his wife Marion, who worshiped in one of these synagogues as a young girl, Barry traveled to Lithuania and Latvia with a film crew to document these few remaining examples. While there, he and his crew discovered four more synagogues.

The resulting award-winning documentary tells the story of the synagogues, the life that surrounded them before the war, and what has happened to them in the last fifty years. The videotape is available in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish. It is forty-eight minutes long in VHS format. For further information, contact the Florida University Libraries, 777 Glades Road, P.O. Box 3092, Boca Raton, FL 33431-0992; telephone: (561) 297-3760; e-mail: LYSCA@fau.edu.

Submitted by: Jacqueline Fineblit, Delray Beach, FL
jackief@worldnet.att.net.

Thanks to Jacqueline for sharing this information with us!