The remarkable, award-winning documentary, “Raise the Roof,” a featured presentation of the Kansas City Jewish Film Festival, recounts the amazing rediscovery and recreation of a vanished universe of Jewish synagogue artistry. It will be shown at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 28, as part of the 19th annual festival put on by the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City.
The film will be screened at The White Theatre at The J, 5801 W. 115th St., Overland Park. The festival continues through May 12. Details can be found at kcjff.org.
Rick and Laura Brown, with the Handhouse Studio outside Boston and affiliated with the Massachusetts College of Art, will be in Kansas City for the film’s screening to explain their efforts to recreate stunning examples of the art and architecture common to wooden Jewish synagogues that spanned the centuries in Poland before they were destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. In a unique opportunity, the filmmakers will take part in a discussion and Q & A session following the movie.
The creation of the Gwozdziec Synagogue roof structure depicted in the film took many years and expanded to involve a global team of students and artisans. In just six weeks this extraordinary team hewed, sawed and carved 200 freshly logged trees and assembled the structure, using only techniques available when the original synagogue was built. Working against this deadline and despite torrential downpours and exhaustion, the team recreated the massive structure and disassembled it again for shipping and eventual installation in The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
To paint the intricate ceiling murals, the Browns faced another challenge: the only surviving photographs of Gwozdziec were black and white, and there had been only one previous study done to estimate what the colors had been. Using that study as their “Rosetta Stone,” the Browns slowly built a library of Gwozdziec’s colors.
“From 2004 to 2007 we worked with students and professionals, in classes and workshops, researching and making large scale models of the exterior of Zabłudow Synagogue and interior paintings of Gwozdziec Synagogue and a full scale replica of the Gwozdziec bimah” said Laura Brown, project co-creator.
Brown went on to describe “the awesome power of the finished synagogue roof and ceiling to everyone who saw it, who walked under it. It made me speechless and overwhelmed.”
She and Rick were also surprised by the lack of awareness of the history of the wooden synagogues in the Jewish world community and in Poland, and were motivated by the need for more knowledge about the topic. Neither of them professes to provide answers to all the questions surrounding the loss of these wonderful structures. Instead, “We just provided the synagogue.”
“Our first objective was to replicate a wooden synagogue built in the 18th century,” Rick Brown said. “But the film goes on to illustrate how the process of recreating a structure quickly turned into a multi-faceted learning adventure on a global scale.”
Individual tickets are $12 while a festival pass is just $84 for all eight films, saving 15 percent.
For more information about the showing, visit kcjff.org or call 913-327-8054.