Jewish immigrants carved out gilded niche in America

By Polina Olsen

article created on:

When the Jewish woodcarvers who decorated Eastern Europe’s synagogues came to America, they often made furniture, cigar store figures and ladies’ combs.

But, amusement parks were popular and the motifs used in sacred art transferred to elaborately carved carousel animals.

“Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses: The Synagogue to the Carousel,” published by Brandeis University press, documents an exhibition currently running at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Guest Curator Murray Zimiles spent 12 years researching and connecting the dots on the largely undocumented trail.
   
In fact, only one woodcarver, Marcus Charles Illions, signed his name on both synagogue carvings and carousel animals. His roaring lions guarded Brooklyn Torah arks with fierce faces, open mouths, sharp fangs, red tongues, and flicking tails identical to the lion on Coney Island’s merry-go-round.

   
Illions left Lithuania to escape conscription and joined Charles I.D. Looff’s carousel factory. One 1910 photo shows him and other carvers surrounded by unfinished carousel figures; carved lions holding a Decalogue rest above the door.
   
Some experts think European Jewish folk art doesn’t exist and cite the ban on graven images. Although Nazi destruction was incalculable, photographs and vestiges of Ashekanzic culture show this notion is not true.
   
In America, lions guarded the Decalogue and Torah as they had for centuries in shtetls. Sadly, as immigrants prospered and moved to the suburbs, old synagogues closed, the art was left behind and forgotten. “I used to weep because the greatest folk art heritage in the world had been destroyed,” said Zimiles in a New York Times interview about the exhibit. “But now there’s this.”
   
Reading the book is like discovering nuggets of hidden history. It begins with Judaica expert Vivian B. Mann’s essay on the history of Jewish folk art. She discusses traditional decoration in life’s three centers: wood carving in the synagogue, stone carving in the cemetery and papercuts in the home. The chapter America: The Synagogue to the Carousel shows how European carvers adapted their art once they arrived in the New World.
   
The 112 chronologically arranged photographs begin with ancient wooden synagogues and lead to exquisite life-like carousel animals. Often illustrating “Be bold as a leopard, swift as an eagle, darting as a deer, and courageous as a lion,” synagogue carvings depicted real and mythical animals—griffins, unicorns and Leviathan. Gravestones had similar imagery. Lions holding a Torah crown over flowering plants indicated the grave belonged to a religious man; broken candles symbolized religious women.
   
The brightly colored section on papercuts illustrates how the technique relates to woodcarving.
   
Bears searching for honey represented the sweetness of Torah; storks symbolized prudence and piety. Used in homes, papercuts on the eastern wall indicated the direction for prayer. Hung over women in childbirth, they repelled the evil eye and Satan’s wife, Lilith.
   
The last photographs in the book show the wood carvers and carousel animals. Many like Solomon Stein and Harry Goldstein emigrated from Russia, and landed in Coney Island. They eventually founded their own shop and their Central Park carousel is still in use. The roof could be from a European shtetl; the horses are resplendent. “It’s amazing to think that millions of children have ridden them,” Zimiles said, “and don’t know who made them.”

“Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses: The Synagogue to the Carousel, Jewish Carving Traditions” by Murray Zimiles, 2007, Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England, hardcover, $35.