Scholars and art experts, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have shown an interest in the wooden synagogues of Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine that is unparalleled with regard to any other branch of the artistic-religious creative tradition of the Jews of Eastern Europe, rich and varied though it is.

The researchers and art experts who drew attention to these small synagogues around the turn of the century and highlighted their originality and Jewishness as well as their beauty and charm are most certainly worthy of recognition. The value of their contribution has, tragically, been further enhanced since the Holocaust and the German war of annihilation against the Jews, and every expression of their cultural and material creativity, completely destroyed the surviving examples of such religious art in Eastern Europe and particularly Poland.

Some three years ago, the National Library in Warsaw made a splendid gesture of tribute to the memory of one of the pioneers of research into the art of Polish synagogues, Mathias Bersohn, by publishing a new, illustrated edition of one of his most important works on Polish-Jewish art, Kitka słów …. Warsaw-born Bersohn, historian of Polish Jewry and founder of the Jewish Antiquities Museum of the Warsaw community, was one of the first to appreciate the beauty of these synagogues and to realize their importance in the history of Jewish folk architecture.

Bersohn's prodigious activity in researching the history of Polish Jewry resulted in a succession of studies written between 1861 and 1906, of which the best known is a collection of historical documents on Polish Jewry between 1388 and 1782 drawn from the state archives and a biographical dictionary of Jewish scholars in Poland in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Bersohn's most important publication, however, in some ways, the seminal work in the field of the religious art of Polish Jewry, was his Kitka słów …, published between 1895 and 1903 as a special publication of the Committee for Research into the History of Art of the Krakow Academy of Sciences. He wrote in the Introduction: