JL: A wooden folk-art style Torah ark once rescued from the basement of an old Hartford synagogue has finally found a permanent home in a new Jewish campus headquarters being dedicated Sunday, June 11 in West Hartford.

As the chief art conservator for the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Stephen Kornhauser gets to rub paint brushes with the most famous names of the art world….Caravaccio, Picasso, Thomas Cole. His latest restoration project for the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford (JHS) doesn’t involve million dollar masterpieces. It is a journey of the spirit to “preserve our Jewish heritage” which we “can’t put a face value on”, he explains.

Kornhauser is volunteering his spare time to painstakingly clean, paint and buff a large, intricate Torah ark which stood proudly in the Beth Hamedrash Hagadol – Hartford’s “Garden Street Synagogue” – from 1922 until 1962. Hundreds of Hartford’s early Jewish immigrants celebrated holidays, bar mitzvahs and weddings there, discovering the religious freedom their descendants so freely enjoy today.

As the Atheneum’s nationally-recognized restoration expert, Kornhauser was contacted by Estelle Kafer, JHS executive director. She saw the exhibit potential when she discovered the ark in a storage space while preparing for the agency’s move to the new Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Community Services Building. Kornhauser immediately signed on to do the work, noting that “for every object that’s been saved, a dozen have been lost.” Kornhauser holds a Masters in Art Conservation from the State University of New York and serves on the Board of Hartford’s Ados Israel Congregation.

Cathrine Fischer Schwartz, Federation executive director and Richard Rubenstein, board chairman, embraced the idea of exhibiting the Torah Ark in the lobby of the facility, which is the new home of the Federation and six community agencies, notes Kafer.

“This is a Jewish building, we need to have Jewish objects,” commented Henry Zachs, Community Capital Campaign co-chair, who immediately endorsed the restoration project. The ark is scheduled to be installed in the new building’s main lobby.

Published descriptions of the ark call it a “large stepped cupboard, elaborately decorated with painted panels of foliate, urn designs and marbleizing.” The Garden Street Synagogue was built in 1922, designed by Hartford architects Julius Berenson and Jacob Moses. The congregation moved to West Hartford in 1962, merging with Ateres Kneset Israel to become the United Synagogues.

The ark remained hidden in the Garden Street basement for two decades, “like a pile of firewood,” according to Fran Waltman, who remembers going to cheder (Hebrew School) there as a young girl in the 1920s. The ark later became part of a JHS exhibit she organized with her husband in the early 1980s, but it has been out of sight until now.

As a founding member of the JHS, Fran is an expert on Hartford’s Jewish lore. She knows the names of the Garden Street Synagogue’s rabbis – Isaac Hurewitz and Cemach Hoffenberg. She remembers “12 kosher butchers and 12 kosher bakeries” and the New York traveling Yiddish theater that came once a year. She treasures her translated copy of a bar mitzvah boy’s Yiddish speech given in front of that painted wooden Torah ark. Other than a few finger smudge marks, faded paint and a few missing cornices, Kornhauser says the ark “is in very good shape.”

“The colors may not match, but we don’t want to make it new or invent anything. We’ll just bring it to a point where it’s smooth and even, yet jumps out. We will be respectful and truthful.”