Obj. ID: 8837
Jewish Architecture Wooden Beit Midrash in Alsėdžiai, Lithuania
The beit midrash is a log house of an almost square plan standing on a masonry foundation made of boulders. It is covered
by a hipped tin roof, still visible under the asbestos sheets. According to a photograph from 1989, the eastern façade had six rectangular windows, grouped into three. A broader pier in the center of the façade indicates the location of the Torah ark in the interior. Today (2007), the eastern façade is pierced by three large gates, and only on the lateral façades the upper parts of the windows still correspond to the original ones. There are six small windows on the southern façade, three small windows and a large gate on the northern façade and four small windows and a doorway on the western façade. This doorway might have served as an entrance to the prayer hall or to the women’s section.
It is difficult to reconstruct the former shape, since the interior is destroyed except for the wall that divides the building into
a larger eastern and a smaller western part – presumably the prayer hall and a vestibule or women’s section (Fig. 5). Traces of
light blue paint are still perceptible on the walls beneath the later layers of paint and plaster. It seems that the façades underwent
considerable change as well, since the older photograph shows a horizontal weather-boarding, while today the boarding is vertical.
sub-set tree:
Cohen-Mushlin, Aliza, Sergey Kravtsov, Vladimir Levin, Giedrė Mickūnaitė, Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė (eds.), Synagogues in Lithuania. A Catalogue, 2 vols. (Vilnius: VIlnius Academy of Art Press, 2010-12)