Destroyed wooden synagogue in Mogilev, Belarus
The Cold Synagogue or Školišča Synagogue (, ) was a synagogue located near the intersection of Vyalikaja Hramadzianskaya (now Grażdanskaya) and Pravaya Naberezhnaya Streets, in Mogilev, Belarus.
The wooden synagogue was established in c. 1680, sited adjacent to a cheder. The interior was almost entirely covered with magnificent polychromes made in 1740s by the Słuck painter, Chaim ben Yitzchak ha-Levi Segal. In the beginning of the 20th century, several ethnographic expeditions, by Alexander Miller, S. An-sky and Solomon Yudovin, and by El Lissitzky and Issachar Ber Ryback documented and photographed interiors of the synagogue. After the article by Lissitzky, interior murals of the synagogue became quite famous in artistic circles. It was decided by the state authorities in 1918 that the synagogue was covered by legal protection. However, the synagogue was closed in 1938 and then dismantled by government authorities. The photos, drawings, and article by El Lissitzky is almost all evidence that preserved.
History.
The Cold Synagogue (named Cold because was unheated in winter), considered the most important in Mogilev, was built around 1680. It was located near the intersection of Vyalikaja Hramadzianskaya and Pravaya Naberezhnaya Streets, in the Jewish district of Školišča (literally "School district"), in a place marked today with a symbolic menorah (at the back of the preserved synagogue in Školišča, next to the blue gazebo erected on the occasion of the anniversary of the local water supply company).
In 1918, by one of the first decrees of the new Soviet government, the synagogue was recognized as a monument of the past and placed under state protection. Later it turned out to be the last stronghold of Jewish religious life in Mogilev and was closed in 1937. In 1938, it was dismantled into logs used for wells. Images of Segal's frescoes remained only in photographs and drawings by Ryback and Lissitzky. Lissitzky’s original copies of the Mohilev synagogue decorations have been lost. They were reproduced in the journal that published his article and reprinted in many books on the cultural heritage of East European Jewry. They remain among Lissitzky’s most frequently reproduced works.
Architecture.
The synagogue building was a wooden structure built on a stone foundation. It was a typical example of wooden synagogues in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, very few of which preserved (most were destroyed in wars, pogroms, or by Soviet authorities). The walls of the Cold Synagogue were cut from edged logs into a clean corner. The central log house was dominant in height, to which side log houses were adjoined as covered galleries. A pentagonal structure was added to the main facade, which covered the main entrance. The building was covered with a high gable roof, with a complex plan and numerous outbuildings. In the end of 19th - beginning of 20th century the roof was covered with tin.
The most detailed memoirs of the synagogue are in the article by El Lissitzky:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;The walls—wooden, oaken beams that resound when you hit them. Above the walls, a ceiling like a vault made out of boards. The seams all visible. Although the work of the carpenter is without artfulness, without imagination, the whole interior of the shul is so perfectly conceived by the painter with only a few uncomplicated colors that an entire grand world lives there and blooms and overflows this small space.
The complete interior of the shul is decorated, starting with the backs of the benches, which cover the length of the walls, all the way to the very pinnacle of the vault. The shul, which is a square at the level of the floor, becomes an octagonal vaulted ceiling, resembling a yarmulke. Triangular panels mask the transition from square to octagon. These walls and ceiling are structured with an immense feel for composition. This is something completely contrary to the primitive. This is the fruit of a great culture. Where does it come from? The master of this work, Segal, says in his inscription, full of the most noble enthusiasm: “Long already have I wandered through the world of the living...”
Ethnographic expeditions.
First known ethnographic expedition that visited Mogilev was by archaeologist and ethnographer Alexander Alexandrovich Miller in 1908. In 1913, S. An-sky, founder of Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society, together with artist and photographer Solomon Yudovin, also visited Cold Synagogue. Some photos made by Miller and Yudovin are now in the Russian Museum of Ethnography in Saint Petersburg.
According to published data, attention was drawn to the synagogue and its murals after the 1916 expedition by El Lissitzky and Issachar Ber Ryback, famous representatives of avant-garde art movement, and an article by an influential art critic Rachel Wischnitzer, published in the Volume XI of "History of the Jewish People", "History of the Jewish People in Russia", in 1914 along with several photographs of the paintings. Some researchers argue that this expedition was also sponsored and commissioned by S. An-sky's Jewish Historical Ethnographic Society, while others said that there are no evidence of that.
Interior murals.
Chaim Segal.
The interior was almost entirely covered with magnificent polychromes made in 1740 by the Slutzk painter Chaim ben Yitzchak ha-Levi Segal. It is unusual that the name of the mural painter is known, the only reason to that is the inscriptions that Chaim Segal made on the walls of the synagogue.
First inscription, on a cartouche at the springing or base of the dome on the entrance side said:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;I have traveled many days in the lands of the living. ;br ; I have felt in my duty to execute this decoration donated by pious hearts.
The text continues on a shield below:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;By the master skilled in the holy work, Hayyim, son of Yitzhak Eisik Segal, from the Holy Community of Slutzk.
The first inscription contains a chronogram of the Hebrew year, that corresponds to 1740.
Description.
Segal's murals, made on boards, represented the images of 12 signs of the zodiac, arabesques, mythical animals and cities. Wischnitzer and Lissitzky wrote about the decorations at length.
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;With many modes varied, these ornamental motifs became widespread in the 17th and 18th centuries. We meet them in abundance on the walls and vaults of synagogues. They dress with a continuous pattern the domes of synagogues in Kopys, in Mogilev on the Dnieper and in Michalpol, on Podil. In these unpretentious looking wooden huts, you can admire arabesques, which are rare for such a late time of purity of the drawing, cartouches framing prayer inscriptions of a noble, calm form and impressive grotesque lions on the background of deciduous stains. This painting is akin to the ornament that was engraved on metal shields during the Renaissance: the same foliage pattern, the same rope gossip, beasts, fantastic gradations in medallions.
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;The twelve signs of the zodiac, usually placed in the medallions, at the top of the dome, are interpreted, for example, in the meaning of the tribes of Israel; heraldic eagles, lions, panthers and deer, typical representatives of the fauna of Asia Minor, whose images are borrowed from middle-aged illustrated manuscripts, from Persian carpets, from engravings of the Renaissance era, are used to visually explain the sacred texts. In this role, they appear on the walls of the synagogue in Yablonov, illustrating the dictum from the Mishna: Be brave like a panther, light like an eagle, fast like a deer, and brave like a lion, while doing the will of your Father in heaven. Lion is also used as the emblem of the tribe of Judas; on the breast of the eagle, finally, the Polish heraldic one-headed eagle, afterwards replaced by the two-headed Austrian, are placed in the middle of the shield in the blessing hands of the Aaronids.
Chaim Segal and Marc Chagall.
Marc Chagall claimed that Chaim Segal was his great-grandfather, and compared his own art to Segal's synagogue murals:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;Jews, if they feel like it (I do), may cry that the painters of the shtetl wooden synagogues (why am I not with you in one grave) and the whittlers of the wooden synagogue rattles — "Hush!" (I saw it in An-sky's collection, got seared) are gone. But what is really the difference between my crippled Mohilev great-grandfather Segal who painted the Mohilev synagogue and me, who painted the Yiddish theater (a good theater) in Moscow? Believe me, no fewer lice visited both of us as we wallowed on the floor and in workshops. in synagogues and in theater. Furthermore, I am sure that, if I stop shaving, you would see his precise portrait...
By the way, my father [looked like him]. Believe me, I put quite a bit of effort, no less love (and what love!) have we both expended.
The difference is only that he [Segal] took orders for signs and I studied in Paris, about which he also heard something.
Most modern researches doubt it, and there is no evidence that Chagall had ever seen any murals that Segal created. It's also possible that "elter-zeyde" ("great-grandfather" in Yiddish) simply means "forefather" or "ancestor" with no hereditary commitment.
El Lissitzky and Issachar Ber Ryback's expedition.
The description and copies of the paintings were left in an article dedicated to Jewish art, "On the Mogilev Shul: Recollections", by El Lissitzky, who visited Mogilev with his colleague-artist Issachar Ber Ryback. They toured a number of cities and towns of the Belarusian Dnieper region and Lithuania in order to identify and fix on photo the monuments of Jewish antiquity. Lissitzky's article on the Cold Synagogue was published in 1923 in Berlin by the Jewish magazine "Rimon–Milgroim".
In the work of Rachel Wischnitzer, the painting of the Mogilev synagogue is compared with the paintings of the synagogues in Yablonovo and Kopys. Moreover, the Yablonov painting is assessed by the author higher than the painting by Chaim Segal, at least "in terms of the selection of ornamental material." Lissitzky wrote enthusiastically and emotionally describing elements of wall painting. Here is his first impression of what he saw: "No, this was something different from that first surprise I received when I visited the Roman basilicas, the Gothic cathedrals, the Baroque churches of Germany, France, and Italy. Maybe, when a child awakens in a crib that is covered with a veil upon which flies and butterflies are sitting and the entire thing is drenched by the sun, maybe the child sees something like that."
Lissitzky's assessment of the skill of Chaim Segal is also very different in comparison with that given by Rachel Wischnitzer: "The treasury of forms used by the painter is inexhaustible. One sees how it all flowed from him, as from a cornucopia, and how the hand of the virtuoso never grew tired and never allowed itself to be outpaced by the speed of thought. On the back of the holy ark I discovered the first sketches in pencil of the outline of the entire painting, which served as the foundation of the later work in paint. This outline was sketched on the wall by a master with intense confidence, for whom the pencil is perfectly under the control of his will."
Further, about Chaim Segal, El Lissitzky mentions a common legend told about the old masters who created a kind of miracle: "People say that he painted three shuls. In Mogilev, Kopust, and in Dolhinov (others recall a different location for the latter). After he had finished, he fell from the scaffolding and died. Each shtetl tells the story about itself: the Mogilevers say he died in Mogilev, the Kapusters—in Kopust, the Dolhinevers—there. The last two shuls burned down. The Dolhinov burned long ago; my father used to say that he remembered a giant fresco in it of the burial of Jacob with a wagon, horses, the sons of Jacob, Egyptians, etc. Today we cannot compare. But the story is characteristic for our understanding of the artist. His work was so great that his continued life could only diminish him. Once his work was completed his soul had no more reason to be in his body."
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;The centerpiece of the whole place is the ceiling. On the western side, by the entrance, there stand giant lions and, behind them, peacocks. The lions hold two shields with inscriptions, the lower one is a memorial by the master for himself. Then there are three northern and three southern panels like a kind of frieze upon which unfurls the