The Timber Frame roof structure was completed last summer by an international team of timber framers and students. The workshop took place at the Folk Architecture Museum in Sanok, the largest open-air ethnographic architectural museum in Poland.
All of the nearly 200, 17th and 18th century wooden synagogues built throughout the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth were destroyed by the end of World War II, yet the vernacular wooden architectural style - both aesthetically and structurally - are still apparent in many other existing wooden structures in Poland.
The Timber Frame roof, along with the completed painted panels, will be installed in the Core Exhibition at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
The Painted Ceiling Workshops will be located in five cities throughout Poland. Handshouse Studio and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews have coordinate with these selected communities to use appropriate existing masonry synagogues in the cities as locations for the workshops of the Gwoździec synagogue ceiling painting. The workshops will take place in Gdansk, Sejny, Kazimierz Dolny, Zamość, and Wroclaw. These workshop events will serve as teaching platforms not only for students creating the paintings, but also for the local communities.
Demonstrations of the painting process will be open to the public. This will bring attention to local synagogues, the history of the people who worshiped in them, and the urgency of preserving existing masonry synagogues throughout Poland, like those in which the workshops are being conducted. The ceiling painting will be installed into the timber roof structure as part of the core exhibition at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.