Moscow Architecture's Rich Jewish Heritage

With the amount of attention currently being lavished on the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, one has to be reminded that contemporary Russia officially espouses a policy of freedom of religion. Through their architectural heritage one can learn the story of these other believers that lurk in the shadows of the Russian Orthodox Church.


Despite being comparatively small in number, one religious group, Jews, has made an impressive mark on the cityscape.


Historical documents indicate the presence of Jews in Moscow as early as the 15th century, but it was only in the 1840s that significant numbers were allowed to live in the city. Under Tsar Nikolai I, Jewish soldiers and some skilled experts received permission to live in Moscow. But it was in the 1860s that communities started to develop -- after the Moscow government started allowing Jews to apply for residence status.


By the 1890s the Jewish population in Moscow had grown to 30,000. However, the general governor of Moscow at the time, Great Prince Sergei Alexandrovich Romanov, saw no place for Jews in his city. In 1891 he made a restriction that only Jews with a higher education could live in Moscow. As a result, a mass exodus ensued with Jews emigrating to the United States, Palestine, Ukraine, Poland and Belarus. By 1893 the Jewish population had dwindled to a mere 7,000.


With the dawning of the Soviet era, the situation brightened. After the February 1917 Revolution, the Provisional Government gave Jews outright permission to live in Moscow.


Moscow Choral Synagogue, 10 Bolshoi Spasoglinishchevsky Pereulok


Because the Jewish population had grown to a significant enough size by 1870, the Jewish community leased a building to be used for both religious services and educational purposes. Thus, the first Choral Synagogue was housed in a two-story building on Solyanka Ulitsa, just down the street from the current quarters. The building served as synagogue, Hebrew school, orphanage and technical school for the Jewish community, where tailors, bookbinders and furriers could learn their trades.


In 1886, however, banker and Jewish community leader Lazar Polyakov purchased the current site on Spasoglinishchevsky Pereulok. Architect Semyon Eibushitz, who had done a number of other projects for Polyakov, was commissioned to design the yellow-stuccoed synagogue with its classical temple front. Unfortunately, the synagogue opened in 1891 during the administration of the unsympathetic General-Governor Romanov.


According to Jewish historian Margarita Labovskaya, the general-governor had developed a particular antipathy toward the building from an incident that occurred one day while he was walking in the neighborhood. As the story goes, Romanov heard bells chiming from a nearby church, so in the traditional Russian Orthodox manner the general governor crossed himself facing what he thought was a church cupola, but what turned out to be the synagogue's cupola. Upon realizing his mistake, the angered mayor ordered the cupola destroyed and the synagogue closed indefinitely.


When the freedom to choose one's religion was declared in 1905 in light of the uprisings of that year, the Jewish community reopened the synagogue replete with a new interiors designed by architect Roman Klein, best known for designing the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art.


The main prayer hall with its three aisles and barrel-vaulted ceiling is not unlike Christian churches in the West. As in a Jewish synagogue, however, no human forms can be depicted, Klein covered the walls, ceilings and stained glass with plants and geometric patterns in ornate configurations. He looked to the curvaceous lines of the then popular style moderne, with its winding organic motifs, to create an opulent yet solemn space.


After the 1917 Revolution, the synagogue again came under threat, but this time from within its own ranks. Jewish Bolsheviks demanded that the temple be converted into a workers' club, but despite their efforts the synagogue has remained open to this day.


Zemelny Bank/Polyakov House, 13, 15 Tverskoi Bulvar


As head of the lucrative Zemelny Bank, or Land Bank, synagogue sponsor Polyakov was in a position to support Jewish causes in an altruistic manner. Polyakov lived in the expansive shell-pink, two-story compound at 15 Tverskoi Bulvar, while his sprawling U-shaped bank stands at No. 13. Today both buildings belong to Promstroibank.


Designed by the same Semyon Eibushitz who did the Choral Synagogue, the bank was originally a five-story neoclassical palace. In the Soviet era, the building was reconstructed, transforming Eibushitz' comparatively sober design into a stellar example of the theatrical monumentalism of the Stalinist era. An enormous triumphal arch was attached to the main entrance and additional floors were added to take advantage of the prime location. The original building was also clad in a limestone that over the past 40 years has lost the beauty it may have once possessed, having acquired the ubiquitous gray patina of heavily trafficked central Moscow. In its incarnation today as Promstroibank headquarters, the 100-year-old bank building is undergoing another reconstruction. The less than impressive limestone cladding put on the building in the '50s is being stripped off and a yellow stucco reapplied, complete with classical details.


As the redesign of the Soviet 1950s left its contemporary stamp, so, too, today's redesign has the requisite mansard roof and the postmodern arched windows. And beyond the oversized doors, a lavishly restored entrance hall is revealed. Mirrors and gilding cover the sea-green walls effecting an appearance of an elegance of days gone by. Yet, upon closer inspection, nestled amid the classical swags is the current occupants' incongruous corporate logo, which reappears in the cast-iron grill over the bank tellers' heads.


Dorogomilovo Cemetery site, 24 and 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt


Jewish Moscow was not untouched by the often destructive building campaigns undertaken under Stalin. In the late 1930s when the construction of Kutuzovsky Prospekt cut through the Dorogomilovo neighborhood in order to provide a direct route from the Kremlin to the dachas of Stalin and party brethren at Kuntsevo, one of the most sacred sites in the Jewish community was destroyed.


The old Dorogomilovo Cemetery, where Jews had been interred since the 1840s and Russians even earlier -- albeit segregated within the burial ground -- was destroyed with the construction of this monumental avenue with its enfilade of grandiose Stalinist-era apartment buildings built for the party elite. Both Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Yury Andropov lived at 26 Kutuzovsky.


One famous Jew buried at Dorogomilovo was Rabbi Yakov Maze, one of the first rabbis of the Choral Synagogue. Educated as a lawyer, Maze was a strong advocate of Jewish rights until his death in 1924. He was best known for his expert testimony in the famous 1911 Beylis case, when M. Beylis was accused of killing a boy for his blood as part of an alleged Jewish ritual. Maze's mastery of Jewish law was instrumental in Beylis' eventual acquittal.


Those whose relatives were buried there were given the opportunity to relocate them to the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery in southwest Moscow. Nevertheless, many unclaimed graves remain to this day, embedded in the foundations of the buildings at 24 and 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt.


Jews residing in the Davydkovo region near the dacha-goers final destination in Kuntsevo were likewise subject to displacement. Stalin's "anti-cosmopolitanism" campaign -- anti-Semitism delicately phrased -- was renewed after World War II.


In 1952, a number of Jewish doctors were accused of being enemies of the people, as had become routine in this period. As it happened, these doctors lived in Davydkovo near Stalin's dacha, thus all of the Jews in the area were deemed suspect and ordered to relocate.


Mariina Roshcha Synagogue, 5a 2nd Vyacheslavtsev Pereulok


In contrast to its downtown counterparts, this modest synagogue was built in 1926 to serve the largely working-class Jews who had settled in the Mariina Roshcha neighborhood in northern Moscow before the revolution.


It is a wonder that a new building was built at this time when so many religious edifices were being destroyed or converted into factories, warehouses or being put to some other appropriately irreverent usage.


The Jewish community was able to build their synagogue because it appeared to be just an ordinary building. It was hidden among other buildings and was never registered as a working synagogue. In 1991 the wooden building was almost demolished by an accidental fire, according to Labovskaya. The synagogue has since been rebuilt in stone and serves a community of Hasidic Jews who follow the Lubavitch movement.


Moscow's Jewish community still confronts adversity today, but it flourishes despite massive losses to emigration. Another synagogue has started holding services, prayer halls have been set up in Jewish schools and a sect of Reform Jews worships in a rented hall. Likewise, the 1991 opening of a Jewish University and the creation of the Museum of Contemporary Jewish Art (by appointment, tel. 163-9393) attest to the community's rebirth.


The Jewish Community Center, (tel. 110-8611/4853) can arrange walking tours guided by Margarita Labovskaya, who is currently working on a book that will tell the story of Jewish Moscow through its landmarks.