Century-Old Jewish Mural's Hidden History in Vermont

JEWISH FORWARD
By Samuel D. Gruber

VERMONT---An old apartment building in Burlington, Vt. seems like an odd place to find a rare survivor of Lithuanian synagogue art and a relic of American immigrant Yiddishkeit. The Lost Shul Mural, as it has come to be called, was revealed beneath the walls of an apartment building that once housed the Orthodox Chai Adam Synagogue, founded in 1889, after splintering off from Ohavi Zedek. It was probably decorated in 1910 when the congregation engaged a young Lithuanian Jewish artist, Ben Zion Black, to paint the synagogue. The mural is a rare and striking painting, one of only a small number of extant synagogue murals in North America painted by immigrant Jewish artists for congregations that were still tied to their distant homelands, the Yiddish language and traditional Jewish religious practice. [link]