Turning the Nightmares of Evil into a Shared Dream of Good
The Koffler BY Exhibition
Toronto, Canada
Director: Anthony Sargent
Curators: Robert Jan van Pelt, Manuel Herz
Photography: Iwan Baan, Edward Burtynsky, Maxim Dondyuk
Project Team: Douglas Birkenshaw, Francesca Mautone, Oleksey Makukhin, Jim Panou, Alicia Baum, Wesley Chu
with deep gratitude to the many supporters and donors whose generosity made this project possible.
Exhibition: 17 april - 12 nov 2023
The Synagogue at Babyn Yar
Commissioned by the Babyn Yar Foundation, which in 2016 had become the steward of the 160 hectare site of the greatest single massacre in the Holocaust (on the eve of Yom Kippur, 1941), it was designed by Basel-based architect Manuel Herz, who had acquired fame a decade earlier as the designer of the new synagogue in Mainz, the famous centre of Judaism in early-medieval Germany.
The Babyn Yar synagogue gently touches a soil imbued with immense tragedy, while also recollecting in its bold and high-spirited design, inspired by a Siddur that can be opened and closed with rich decoration, not only the idiosyncratic spatial understanding that has characterized the Jewish concept of space since the Babylonian exile, and the distinctive and at times quirky architecture of the painted wooden synagogues of the East European shtetl, but also the playful forms of an animated understanding of the world intuited by children and, at their own peril, forgotten by grown-ups.
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The Synagogue at Babyn Yar; Turning the Nightmares of Evil into a shared Dream of Good includes a short presentation of the Babyn Yar massacre and its afterlife in both official Soviet and informal Jewish memory; the dramatic history of the Babyn Yar site after 1945; the current condition at Babyn Yar as an eloquent natural reserve and public park; the debate within the Architectural Board of the Babyn Yar Foundation on Jewish spatial and architectural traditions that triggered the idea to construct a synagogue; the key idea of Manuel Herz’s project in the double context of now utterly bygone East European Jewish architectural traditions and the tradition of the moveable pop-up books or Harlequinades; a documentation of the Synagogue’s design development; the remarkable mobilization of Ukrainian builders and artists that allowed for the construction of the synagogue in record time; the profoundly moving commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the massacre at the new synagogue in October 2021; the fate of the synagogue in the current war, and the significance of the synagogue for the future of Jewish architecture.
