The architect Eric Mendelsohn was born in Allenstein, Germany. His earliest buildings were influenced by expressionism, but his style soon turned in a more linear direction. In Germany, he built strikingly modern department stores for Salman Schocken. When the Nazis came to power, he fled to England, where he was one of a handful of architects building in the internationalist style. In 1935, he opened an office in Jerusalem, and in 1939 he moved there. In Mandate Palestine, he did some of his best work; among the iconic buildings he designed were the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, Chaim Weizmann’s home in Rehovot, Salman Schocken’s home and library in Jerusalem, and the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Jerusalem. In 1941, he moved to San Francisco. While the synagogues he designed in his American years were modernist in style, they were less remarkable than his work in Germany and Palestine.
Safed is in the upper Galilee, in the Naftali region, with the bulk of the city atop the mountain. Surrounding the city’s mountain are some four mountains; on two of them, all the people are…
Shearith Israel was the first Jewish congregation established in North America, and the only Jewish congregation in New York City from 1654 until 1825. Between 1654 and 1730, it met in rented quarters…
This episode occurred on Deribasov Street, about two years after the beginning of our story.
At that time our editorial office was located at the upper end of the street, in the…