In 160th Year: Still Looking at Baumhorn
Ruth Ellen Gruber, editor of the essential website Jewish-Heritge-Europe.eu writes on JHE, writes that:
“This year marks the 160th birthday of the Hungarian architect Lipot Baumhorn, the most prolific synagogue architect in pre-WW2 Europe. (He died in 1932.) His life and work this year are a focus of the EU-funded Rediscover Jewish Heritage project, a network of nine small cities in eight countries, cooperating on ways to reveal and promote their often hidden Jewish history. Earlier this year, representatives of three of the partner cities –Timisoara, Romania; Subotica, Serbia; and Szeged, Hungary – met in Timisoara – a city where Baumhorn was very active. The first building he designed in Timisoara was the so-called Fabric District Synagogue, built between 1897 and 1899.” Jewish-Heritage-Europe.eu reports regularly on the state of many surviving Baumhorn synagogues in Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.
In honor of the 160th anniversary of the birth of Hungarian-Jewish architect Lipot Baumhorn, Ruth has posted a chapter about “Looking for Baumhorn” from Upon the Doorposts of Thy House (1994), her very first book on Jewish subjects. Eszter Nagy-Tóth and Gábriel Szekély have also written an essay on JHE about visiting the Fabric synagogue, a Lipót Baumhorn gem in Timisoara, Romania, with links to more detailed descriptions and analysis of the building’s architecture and present-day condition. the building was extensively photographed by Boris Khaimovich for the Center for Jewish Art in 1997.