Salvage Drive for Rare Jewish Mural in Vermont

 

BURLINGTON, Vt. — The mural was created inside a synagogue in 1910 by a sign painter named Ben Zion Black, who had just moved to this city’s growing Jewish community from Lithuania. He was paid $200 by the Chai Adam congregation for what became a two-story artwork in a style that was common in Eastern Europe’s painted wooden synagogues. Most vanished in the Holocaust.

Now it seems that the work here in Burlington — a city better known as the birthplace of the rock band Phish than as a cradle of Jewish history — is among the most complete existing examples of this kind of folk art. And few people knew it existed.

For more than 25 years it disappeared from view, walled off by Sheetrock when the building — first a synagogue, then retail stores — was converted into apartments. It remained hidden until a couple of years ago, when some of the city’s Jews began devising a plan to uncover and preserve the mural.

“Because this is the only one of its kind in the world, there’s no choice,” said Aaron Goldberg, 57, an estate planner who is the archivist at the city’s Ohavi Zedek synagogue, with which Chai Adam merged and which is leading the preservation effort.

To do that, Mr. Goldberg and others have begun a complex and costly effort to stabilize and clean the ravaged surface, remove the roof and wooden beams around it and extract it from the building, in one piece, if possible. They plan eventually to install it in the lobby of Ohavi Zedek.

For much of its century-long history, the mural was viewed as a decidedly local curiosity. The synagogue in which it was painted was at the center of a section of town that was laid out like the Lithuanian shtetl from which many of its residents — including Mr. Goldberg’s ancestors — had emigrated, with synagogues surrounded by purveyors of kosher goods in “Little Jerusalem” in Burlington’s Old North End.

The mural, which originally sat behind the synagogue’s ark and rose to adorn the arched ceiling, was a rendering of traditional Jewish iconography: two rampant lions of Judah on either side of a tablet of the Ten Commandments beneath a Torah crown. The images are shrouded by elaborate curtains that evoke the Tabernacle, the Israelites’ tentlike desert sanctuary.

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Ms. Silver restoring the mural. Credit Jacob Hannah for The New York Times

But the artist, a lover of music and Yiddish theater, added personal touches: The work shows musical instruments, dismaying some in the congregation, according to the archives. The upper part of the mural that rose above the ark survives; the lower half and the adornment of the ceiling having been lost over the years, after the building entered private hands.

In 1939, Chai Adam merged with Congregation Ohavi Zedek, and the mural later became a peculiar backdrop for the stores that later filled the space.

“It was kind of an intriguing oddity that was surrounded, as I recall in youth, by carpets and business and things of the sort,” said Jeffrey Potash, 60, who is also an archivist at Ohavi Zedek and who, like Mr. Goldberg, grew up here, noticing the mural. “So I never gave it much thought.”

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The painter, Ben Zion Black, right, with his wife.

But Mr. Goldberg’s intuition told him the mural was worth saving. When the building was to be converted into apartments in 1986, he tried in vain to find an institution that would take the mural. He made archival photos and had the mural hidden behind a false wall in the hope of eventually preserving it. At the time, Mr. Goldberg said, “There was really very little scholarly work that had been done on the lost painted synagogues. We couldn’t even determine what we had then.”

For nearly 25 years, he says, tenants filled the apartment with no idea it was there. But it gnawed at Mr. Goldberg, who had a segment of the wall opened and resealed in 2010, and then began exploring his options to preserve the mural.

When the building was sold again, he approached its new owner, Steven Offenhartz, who was not himself sure what was behind the wall.

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The original mural depicted in the same book.

“I’d heard rumors that it was there,” he said, but after learning more he agreed to donate the mural to Ohavi Zedek in the name of his father, Michael. Mr. Goldberg and the synagogue rented the apartment that held it. In 2012, Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Potash arranged to take down the Sheetrock and consulted with preservation experts to devise a plan to save the mural.

Last year, the mural caught the attention of Samuel D. Gruber, an art and architecture historian who has lectured at Syracuse University and who has extensively studied the Eastern European painted synagogues. He was astonished by the mural. He said that he had seen pieces of surviving murals in Europe, and examples of decorated synagogues in Chelsea, Mass., and Toronto, but that he had not seen such a complete segment of the decoration where so much was known about the artist. “When I saw the first photos of it, I knew it was special. I couldn’t point to a single other example like it anywhere,” said Mr. Gruber, who added, “I really didn’t expect to see this in Burlington.”

On a recent afternoon, a conservator, Constance Silver, of Brattleboro, Vt., had her tools spread out in front of the mural. A breeze from outside ruffled the plastic that was helping to stabilize segments of paint. Tiny, crispy specks of paint had already fallen off the wall, dusting the carpet.

“This is about as close as it gets to self-destructing,” Ms. Silver said. The work, she said, was painted directly onto the plaster of the synagogue’s wall, which has absorbed the paint’s oils, rendering them dry as cornflakes, which she is now securing, square by square. And the mural has yellowed with the grime of indoor smoking and cooking from the kitchen. When the paint is fully stabilized, Ms. Silver will clean it. She already knows this will electrify its colors — including turning the curtains it depicts from dark green to a bright blue, consistent with Jewish symbolism.

But restoration and relocation will be expensive. So far the organizers say they have raised at least $64,000 of the several hundred thousand that will be needed for that process, and to create educational materials around it. But for those who have seen the piece, the cost is beside the point, as is its monetary value.

Elizabeth Berman, a Boston appraiser who is working with Mr. Offenhartz and Mr. Goldberg, said it would be difficult to assign a value to the mural because there was little to compare it to. “This issue is that it’s so rare and we don’t really see cases like this in the appraisal world,” she said.

Mr. Gruber, the historian, said, “We’re not talking about a great art masterpiece,” but added, “What really makes it special is that it is a survivor.”