Eric Mendelsohn's Park Synagogue: Architecture and Community by Walter C. Leedy Jr. (review)

Walter C. Leedy Jr. carefully examines the construction of the Park Synagogue in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, during the middle of the twentieth century in his book Eric Mendelsohn's Park Synagogue: Architecture and Community. Before World War II, the Anshe Emeth congregation, which was migrating to one of Cleveland's eastern suburbs, looked to gain a new vitality. The group believed this could be achieved by building an impressive new synagogue for the Jewish community. Eventually, it hired Eric Mendelsohn, a well-known architect who worked in both Europe and the United States. The structure he created represented the modernist design prevalent in the United States during the middle of the twentieth century.

Rather than strictly focusing on the architectural history of this structure, the author also shows how this building reflected the larger social, political, and economic themes prevalent during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for the Jewish community residing in the Cleveland area. By doing this, he is able to show how religion influenced and was influenced by the larger community around it. Initially, the membership of the Anshe Emeth congregation was small, but when Cleveland, like most other major American cities at the end of the nineteenth century, experienced a rapid influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, membership increased. For a time, many Jews lived in Cleveland, but Leedy asserts that by the late 1930s, the center of the Jewish population began to migrate farther east, toward the Cleveland Heights area. Because of this move, the congregation decided that it needed to build a newer synagogue to house its increasing number of members.

After a competition in which local architects submitted designs for the new synagogue, the religious leaders employed Mendelsohn as the lead architect for the new structure. He came to Cleveland with specific design ideas for the impressive new building. He wanted to build something unique that would allow congregants to feel proud of their new synagogue. As he constructed his new building, he faced questions and concerns from members of the congregation, but he pushed forward with his original ideas. Leedy specifically shows how the architect wanted to build a synagogue that would be stunning, yet simple.

To prepare this cogent history of the synagogue and its congregation, the author spent considerable time at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, and he and his assistants examined many Cleveland newspaper articles, spanning 150 years, to gain a better sense of the history of Anshe Emeth. Thus, Leedy was able to gain a fuller understanding of how the congregation evolved throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is this type of research that allowed the author to make this book more than a simple architectural history of a singular synagogue. By using the available primary and secondary sources and incorporating social, political, and economic subjects into his manuscript, Leedy gives a strong sense of how and why Anshe Emeth was able to survive and thrive for well over a hundred years and why the Park Synagogue came into being.