Gwoździec Synagogue

The building, which was about 15 meters high, consisted of a rectangular floor plan with post-and-beam walls, and a stepped hip roof covered with wood shingles.

The mission of Handshouse Studio is to create innovative hands-on projects that illuminate history, explore science, and perpetuate the arts by collaboratively recreating lost historic objects as accurately as possible.

Isidor Kaufmann (1853-1921), a Jewish painter in Vienna, who spent many months in the region, made a painting in 1897/1898 of part of the interior of the Gwoździec synagogue, one of a very few color studies of the polychromy.

The timber-framing, which started from 200 raw logs with the bark still on, was completed in three two-week workshops led by Handshouse Studio in collaboration with the Timber Framers Guild, during the summer of 2011 at the Museum of Folk Architecture, Sanok.

The painting workshops took place in the summers of 2011 and 2012 in masonry synagogues in seven cities across Poland: Rzeszów, Kraków, Wrocław, Gdansk, Sejny, Kazimierz Dolny, and Szczebrzeszyn.

At the end of the workshops, the structure was taken apart and stored until the autumn of 2013, when the parts were brought to POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, reassembled, hoisted into place within the core exhibition, and suspended from cables.