Barney Zeitz, stained-glass artist, helps German church honor sanctuary's Jewish history
Barney Zeitz, 65, an artist on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, doesn’t know where in Europe his ancestors lived. But it could have been a town like Flieden, Germany, where there was a Jewish community from 1562 until 1938.
On November 9, 1938, the Flieden synagogue’s windows were broken during Kristallnacht, when Nazis vandalized synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses throughout Germany. The Nazis also burned the Flieden congregation’s Torah scrolls and other sacred objects, according to a website recording the history of synagogues in Germany. But the building survived, and a Protestant parish purchased it in the early 1950s.
A few years ago that parish, the Evangelische Pfarramt Flieden, received a visit from Marie Ariel, a Jewish woman who came to see the sanctuary where her father celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1899. The church wanted to honor the sanctuary’s Jewish history through stained-glass windows made by a Jewish artist. Ariel recommended Zeitz, whose work has included church windows as well as a sculpture for a Holocaust memorial museum in Rhode Island.
