Scholarship for PhD Students — Alexey Kholov
The winner of the competition is Alexey Kholov, a PhD student at the State Institute of Art History, with the topic: "The History of Moscow Synagogue Architecture in the Second Half of the 19th – Early 20th Centuries: Revision and Reconstruction."
Moscow synagogue architecture at the turn of the 20th century is a phenomenon that has still not been studied systematically. Despite numerous works dedicated to individual landmarks, information about them is incomplete, and some synagogues remain entirely unknown to the scholarly community.
The aim of the research is to refine and expand the history of Moscow's synagogues. Placing these monuments within a broad socio-cultural context and drawing upon an extensive corpus of archival sources will enable the reconstruction of their construction history and architectural appearance.
For instance, the unrealized project for a synagogue in Nizhny Kislovsky Lane, designed by Leiba Bakhman, and the project for the lost prayer house at the Dorogomilovsky Jewish Cemetery, composed by Semyon Eibushitz, will be published for the first time. It is also planned to create a graphic reconstruction of the original appearance of the Moscow Choral Synagogue, which underwent multiple renovations in the 1880s–1900s.
In the photo: interior of the Moscow Choral Synagogue (provided by A. Kholov).
The research is carried out with the financial support of A. Klyachin.