Percival Goodman, c. 1940
Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library,
Columbia University
Interior of Congregation B'nai Israel,
Millburn, New Jersey, c. 1952
Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library,
Columbia University In a Jewish house of worship, you want to convey to the people that they are of this world, an essential good world that God has made, that any future world is but an extension and beautification of this world as we know it.
—Percival Goodman (1904–1989)
The sparse, modern designs of Percival Goodman were starkly different from synagogues inspired by historical styles. Since construction of the oldest surviving synagogue in the United States in 1763—the Georgian-style Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island—congregations had followed European models that echoed architectural fashions of the times. Egyptian, Classical, Romanesque, and especially Moorish designs were used for synagogue architecture, conjuring the past to impart historical legitimacy to the present. To many Jewish communities— especially of the Reform and, to a lesser extent, the Conservative movements— modern design signified a move in a new, progressive direction toward a distinctly American Jewish identity.
With his brother Paul, a noted writer and social critic, Goodman advocated utopian communities in which town squares, neighborhood blocks, and religious centers became focal points for social and spiritual gathering. The brothers’ architectural and social manifesto, Communitas, was published in 1947, the same year as their first article on synagogue architecture and art appeared in the Jewish publication Commentary.
Goodman’s passionate interest in designing Jewish cultural and religious spaces was a direct reaction to the tragedy of the Holocaust, reflecting a desire to solidify a sense of Jewish community in America, despite his own lack of any formal religious training or observance. In the following years, he wrote and spoke extensively on synagogue architecture and the crucial place of art within it and built over 60 facilities for Jewish congregations across the country.
Goodman believed synagogue design should serve the functions of the congregation—worship, study, and social gathering—through simple and direct means, using organic materials and natural light whenever possible. This reflected a philosophy common to many modern architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, and Eric Mendelsohn, who all designed synagogues in the mid-twentieth century. As Goodman stated, “Essentially, we have tried to keep God’s materials as near like themselves as possible. We want to feel the laws of gravity and the parts that belong to the earth.” The resulting Millburn synagogue, in Goodman’s words, “honestly belongs to its own time.”
Calling for a “much closer integration between architecture, sculpture, and painting,” Goodman engaged exceptional artists to design and decorate synagogue furnishings. Rabbi Max Grünewald and the members of Congregation B’nai Israel entrusted Goodman to select the artists with the provision that the artists maintain a close and open dialogue with the architect and the rabbi.
“The question is,” mused Rabbi Grünewald in an interview shortly after the artists were commissioned, “Is modern art an anticipation of something to come or is it already capable of being an authoritative vehicle of man’s feeling? In that I trust to God and Percival Goodman.”
Neither the rabbi nor the architect expressed concern over historically narrow interpretations of the Second Commandment’s prohibition against graven images. Grünewald pointed to past examples of representation in Jewish imagery, such as the figurative frescoes of the ancient Syrian synagogue Dura Europos. Goodman, for his part, felt that avant-garde artists created sufficiently abstract work to appease traditional resistance to figuration in synagogue art since “the greatest of them . . . are concerned with the Biblical archetypes, the Prophetic tradition, and the simple sublime spirituality of Jewish theology.”
To identify artists, Goodman consulted the preeminent modern art dealer Samuel Kootz, eventually inviting Robert Motherwell, Herbert Ferber, and Adolph Gottlieb to create site-specific works for his Millburn project. The three artists, like many of their contemporaries, were interested in spirituality, mysticism, and symbolism, and each immersed himself in these essential aspects of the synagogue project. Under Goodman’s visionary plan, the abstract works of art—Ferber’s sculpture, Motherwell’s mural, and Gottlieb’s Torah curtain—invited congregants to embrace traditional belief through modern forms of expression.
Exterior of Congregation B'nai Israel featuring Herber Ferber's And the bush was not consumed...,
Millburn, New Jersey, c. 1952, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University