Schocken Library, Jerusalem

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.