"Synagogues, architectures of memory" at the Museum of Jewish History

Until the month of September, the new temporary exhibition of the Jewish History Museum of Girona Synagogues, architectures of memory, which has been curated by the Institute of Nahmànide Studies, is open to the public.

This exhibition presents a series of prints by the Polish-born artist Dora Szampanier (Jaroslaw, 1922-Haifa, 1997) who was an artist who immigrated to Israel in 1950. The prints in this exhibition, which her family donated to the Patronat del Call de Girona in 1999, propose a visual tour through synagogues that had known times of glory and were reduced to ruins with the Holocaust.

The artist made a total of 83 lithographs, of which the curators have selected a representative sample of different countries and realities.

In Szampanier's works we can see how she evokes a splendor that has disappeared in a Europe that has also disappeared today, and highlights the importance of the synagogue in Jewish communities.

It must be said that the artist numbered and titled his works at the end of the eighties. Under the original title the curators have added the current geopolitical location such as: Odessa, Ukrainia, Lwow-Iserlis, Ukrainia, Tarnopol, Ukarinia, Brody, Ukrainia, etc.
It should be remembered that this exhibition was inaugurated last April and has been produced by the Museum of Jewish History, Patronat Call de Girona and directed by Assumpció Hosta, Sílvia Planas and by the technical team formed by: Neus Casellas, Mireia Compte, Lídia Donat, Marina Donat, Anna López, Sandra Sànchez, Cristina Taberner and Jesica Carolina Zepeda. Ruth E. Gruber and Anna López participated in the audiovisual section.