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.
