Burning Synagogue 3—Nasielsk, Poland

Greta Schreyer (Vienna 1917-New York City 2005)

Oil on canvas, h. 24 x w. 30 in.

USA, 1999

Cincinnati Skirball Museum, gift of Linda Schreyer, 2015.47.2

Greta Schreyer was born in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of a master goldsmith. She too became a master goldsmith and studied art in Vienna and Paris before immigrating to the United States in 1938. In New York, she studied at the New School, The Art Students League, and at Pratt Institute. A prolific artist, she worked in oil, watercolor, and lithography. Near the end of her life, she painted a series of burning wooden synagogues, commemorating the distinctive massive synagogues of 18th-century Poland, destroyed by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Nasielsk is a small town in central Poland, north of Warsaw. The synagogue was built at the end of the seventeenth century by Simcha Weiss, son of Shlomo of Luck. Famous for its magnificent towers, its exterior decoration, and for the delicate carvings on the cornices as well as on the windows and doors, the synagogue was demolished in 1880, almost sixty years before the Nazi invasion, and a new brick temple was constructed on its site. Of the roughly 3,000 Jews who lived in Nasielsk at the time of the Nazi occupation in 1939, fewer than 100 survived the war. In this richly colored canvas, the artist captures the lively decoration of the façade of this lost synagogue, against a background of a night sky and flame-red trees