 | Exciting news! I’ve received a grant from Case Western Reserve’s Experimental Humanities Initiative for my project, “Digital Re-Installation of a Sacred Memorial" This project explores how digital technologies can be used to preserve sacred sites of memory. |
What happens when Extended Reality technologies are used to bring sacred history and contemporary space into simultaneous view?
The focus is on a World War II memorial dedicated in 1947 at Temple Tifereth Israel, Cleveland’s largest Reform synagogue. The installment featured a stained glass series designed by the renowned Arthur Szyk (who happens to be featured in a new exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage), which inscribed the names of the congregation’s 22 fallen sons. Complementing these fifteen remarkable windows, was a bronze pedestal in the form of an American eagle, created to hold a weighty, hand-crafted leather-bound book containing the names and service records of the 700 congregants who had served in the war effort.
Temple Tifereth Israel held a public ceremony to dedicate the memorial during Hannukah of 1947. Seventy years later, the congregation faced a dilemma. Having relocated to a new building in the eastern suburbs, closer to where most of its members now lived, the group gifted their historic golden-domed edifice to Case Western Reserve University. The building would soon be reborn as the Maltz Performing Arts Center. But what of the memorial? Did it belong to the architectural envelope in which it was situated? Or to the community that had commissioned it decades prior?
Recognizing its significance as a touchstone of congregational history and identity, the decision was made to move the ensemble to the new synagogue building in Beachwood. Designers and architects collaborated to reinstall the memorial in a way that honored its original intent, while adapting it to its new spatial context.
Meanwhile as the University building was repurposed into a performance hall and all trace of the memorial disappeared.
What might be the implications of entering this space as it stands today, while simultaneously witnessing its past? Through the affordances of extended reality technology, it is now possible to digitally overlay historic imagery, sacred objects and architectural elements onto contemporary environments, enabling users to experience both temporal layers at once. This project investigates how such a digitally mediated encounter might reshape our understandings of the relationship between space and history, and their intersections through time.
The first phrase involves creating a prototype of the digital memorial.
I will be doing this together with students in my new course “Embodied Religion, Mixed Reality.” We will use extended reality software, Meta quest headsets, and 3D scanning apps, combined with historical research.
I will be doing this together with students in my new course “Embodied Religion, Mixed Reality.” We will use extended reality software, Meta quest headsets, and 3D scanning apps, combined with historical research.
The project will culminate two years from now (Hannukah 2027) in a performative “re-installation” of the memorial to mark the eightieth anniversary of its dedication.
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