Park Synagogue East

Writer: Alys Moody

Religion begins with community. In the coming together of individuals to worship, private spirituality is transformed into the formalised, ritualised, public gathering that marks religion as such. Religion is always called upon to be social and cultural, as well as sacred and divine, and in this way to encourage both spiritual communion and social community. In no other religious tradition is this truer than Judaism, in which community has sustained religion and religion community throughout millennia of exile, persecution and dispossession.

Religious architecture incarnates this intersection of the social and the spiritual. As community centres, churches, mosques, temples and synagogues embody the social; as places of worship, they embody the spiritual. The challenge of religious architecture is thus to provide a building that resonates with the history of the community and the communion with the sacred; a place that inscribes both heaven and earth without losing the vitality of religious experience.

Park Synagogue East, designed by Mark Simon, FAIA with Edward J. Keagle, AIA of Centerbrook Architects, is a serious engagement with this communal aspect of religious architecture. The building is, a second campus for Cleveland, Ohio’s iconic Park Synagogue. The synagogue was founded in 1869, and its current building was designed by Eric Mendelsohn in 1950. Today, its expanding congregation has exceeded its historical limits; Park Synagogue East, twenty minutes’ drive from Park Synagogue, is a response to the community’s need for more space and a more easterly presence in the city.

Incorporating a school and library, as well as the main sanctuary, the building is a community centre for the local congregation. Its façade makes the building’s various programs visible. The school and library are encased in a stick and panel mosaic of copper cladding from which the sanctuary bursts in thick curving walls of Jerusalem stone. The contrast underscores the twin religious and community functions of the centre.

Springing from the school and library, the sanctuary is embedded within the community programs even as it retains its striking independence. The entrances to the school and sanctuary equalise this relationship, with two sweeping and largely symmetrical canopies. Inclining gently towards each other, they embody the companionship that exists between religious worship and education.

The structure is inscribed with references to its history. The stacked stone walls recall Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall. The sanctuary’s wood canopies and ceilings recall both the original tented tabernacle and the framed structures of baroque Eastern European synagogues. The patterned copper walls recall the wood board and battening of medieval synagogues while the copper roofs recall the copper dome of Mendelsohn’s Park Synagogue. Balancing the primordial gravity of Judaism’s historical roots against the synagogue’s more recent roots in Cleveland, the building is instantly located within an historical narrative in which community, history and religion are inseparable.

The sanctuary provides a focal point for this sanctification of community. The bimah, made from wood, lit by discrete lights and animated by elegant silver details, seems to exude vitality, and almost to glow. With its irregular forms and a symbolic language that connotes life itself, it’s an elevation of the earthly and the human to the level of the divine. Embedded within the wooden structure, the magnificent silver doors of the ark (behind which the Torah is kept) are beautifully symmetrical: a mark of the divine within life itself. On the suggestion of the rabbi, these doors have been inscribed with the eight Hebrew words from the Bible explaining how to treat the Torah. Like that of the sanctuary itself, these words connect the congregation to their religious tradition and offer guidance and support in their individual spiritual quests.

The sanctuary repeatedly performs gestures of enclosure, comfort and protection. It is enclosed by extraordinarily thick stone walls, creating a sense of security within the sanctuary itself. Similarly, the wooden canopy over the ark – as well as a second wooden canopy above it, from which lights are hung – reaches out over the congregation, creating a protective enclosure. These gestures of safety collapse a specifically Jewish history of persecution into a more generally religious promise of security and protection. Locating the congregation within an historical and religious community, it literalises the protection conferred upon the believer through their faith, and locates that faith as a shared, communal act of redemption.

Park Synagogue East is a subtle and nuanced response to the intersections of community and divinity that permeates the very nature of religious architecture. Designed as a welcoming and inclusive community centre, it serves as a focal point for the local Jewish community. Echoing with historical, scriptural and cultural references, it serves as a monument to faith and to the global and historical Jewish community. It calls upon the congregation to locate themselves as individuals within the arc of history and tradition and to identify as Jews under the mark of the sacred. In this sense, it’s a worthy sister institution to Park Synagogue, whose iconic design remains an important piece of religious architecture.+

1 Synagogue from entry drive. The Jerusalem stone sanctuary in center has a low wall cloistering a memorial garden. 2 Detail of bimah and ark. Ark doors and ornament are hammered silver, made by Yemeni Silversmiths of Jerusalem. Furniture designed by Centerbrook Architects. 3 Reminiscent of age old ruins, Jerusalem stone piers of different heights support the copper canopies. Light bounces off the piers and leaks around and through the canopies. 4 Entrance detail with stick and panel mosaic of copper cladding on the main body of the building. Sticks are permanent recollections of medieval wood synagogues.