Apr, 29 2014 — (All Things Considered) —
There was a time in Eastern Europe when the landscape was dotted with wooden synagogues, some dating to the 1600s. Inside, the walls and ceilings were covered with intricate painted designs. Almost all of these structures were destroyed during the Holocaust, and with them, a folk art. But in Burlington, Vt., a synagogue mural has been uncovered where it lay hidden for a quarter century.
Aaron Goldberg grew up in Burlington. His family was among the Jewish immigrants, most of them from Lithuania, who settled in a section of the city known as Little Jerusalem in the late 1800s. Goldberg first saw the mural in the 1970s when he was in middle school and accompanied his mother to a carpet store.