09.09.2026

The opening ceremony featured remarks by Victor Sydorenko, President of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine; Valerii Bitaiev, First Vice-President of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine; Vice-Presidents Yurii Vakulenko and Oles Sanin; and Mykola Yakovliev, Academician-Secretary of the Department of Synthesis of Arts. They emphasised the importance of scholarly and artistic projects that support and promote Ukraine’s Jewish heritage, strengthen international cooperation in advancing Ukraine’s presence in the world, and demonstrate a high professional standard in the development and presentation of the project, in which the exhibition brings together scholarly grounding of the subject, an artistic component and innovative technologies, engaging a broad international circle of specialists and young people.

The role of the exhibition’s curator, Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine and Professor Yevhen Kotliar, was given particular attention. He devoted considerable effort to developing the project for a touring exhibition in Germany and to organising its parallel tour in Ukraine, including the exhibition at the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.
The speakers also highlighted Professor Yevhen Kotliar’s longstanding work in the study, preservation and promotion of Jewish art, both in his scholarly and creative practice, exhibition activities and teaching, which provided important foundations for the realisation of this project.
Representatives of the Presidium of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine were present at the opening.
The exhibition curator recalled the history and prehistory of the work on the subject, as well as the earlier stages of research and development of the exhibition project on the regional tradition of synagogue painting in Bukovyna, carried out in cooperation with the Chernivtsi Museum of the History and Culture of Bukovynian Jews (Director Mykola Kushnir). This work resulted in a bilingual catalogue and a series of touring exhibitions in Ukraine held in various cities in 2016–2017.
Well-known public figures were invited to speak: human rights activist and dissident, Chairman of the Association of Jewish Organisations and Communities of Ukraine and Executive Vice-President of the Congress of National Communities of Ukraine Yosyp Zissels; and Leonid Finberg, Director of the Centre for Studies of the History and Culture of East European Jewry, Editor-in-Chief of the Dukh i Litera publishing house and sociologist. Both have been active participants in the Jewish revival in Ukraine since the first years of independence and played an important role in the institutionalisation of Jewish civic and cultural life in Ukraine.
Yosyp Zissels spoke about the public and heritage-preservation work involved in cataloguing and preserving Ukraine’s Jewish heritage, particularly that of Bukovyna. He emphasised the long and complex history of research into Bukovynian synagogues and attempts to establish museums in them, including the synagogue in Novoselytsia, where fifteen years ago unique paintings in the semi-ruined synagogue were uncovered and, at the same time, condemned to destruction; these paintings became one of the exhibition’s principal exhibits. Leonid Finberg, who contributed to the publication of a number of art-historical works on the subject, stressed the importance of continuing to publish books on Jewish artistic heritage, including Professor Kotliar’s scholarly studies of Jewish art monuments researched by Ukrainian scholars in the 1920s and 1930s.
Yevhen Kotliar spoke about the history of the creation of this particular project, which brought together a Ukrainian-German working group of specialists from numerous institutions.
The group was established in October 2023 at the initiative of the Ukraine Art Aid Center, headed by its President, Dr Johannes Nathan, to seek contemporary methods of preserving Ukraine’s Jewish heritage amid the threat of its physical destruction during the Russian-Ukrainian war. Yevhen Kotliar recalled the entire group, its working principles under the leadership of Professor Stefan Hoppe, and the experience of creating the exhibition in Germany, curated by Professor Alexandra Lipinska. The exhibition was first shown in November 2025 at the University and City Library of Cologne, from where it began travelling throughout Germany. It is currently on display in Düsseldorf, with exhibitions planned in Augsburg, Marburg and other cities. The curator emphasised that the first presentation of the exhibition in Ukraine, in the Great Hall of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, is a sign of recognition of and the significance attached to the subject for Ukrainian culture.
The exhibition presents synagogue painting from selected synagogues in Ukrainian Bukovyna, where murals have survived in part and, in some cases, were uncovered and conserved in recent decades in a small number of Jewish houses of worship. The synagogue buildings are presented in the context of the region’s Jewish history and culture: contemporary photographs are complemented by historical images, reconstruction drawings, explanatory texts, painted copies and reconstructions of lost and damaged fragments of murals, and contemporary works that, among other things, explore the symbolism of synagogue painting.
A distinctive feature of the exhibition is its three-dimensional imagery and an animated model of the synagogue in Novoselytsia (Chernivtsi Region), created as part of a documentation project in cooperation with the Institute of Architecture of Mainz University of Applied Sciences and the Ukrainian company Skeiron.

The exhibition is integrated into the exhibition space in such a way that visitors can progressively discover its four distinct yet interconnected sections:
– the historical and cultural context and material environment of Jewish life in Bukovyna;
– synagogue architecture and the reconstruction of the iconographic programmes of the murals;
– contemporary creative work with this heritage by students of the Department of Monumental Painting at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, where synagogue painting is studied, namely: practical experience in studying and creating painted reconstructions (works by students Anna Shcherbakova and Tetiana Zamnius), as well as the creative reinterpretation of narrative motifs and ornamentation in their own work (paintings by Vadym Koltun, who currently lives in Germany);
– experience in laser scanning, the methodology of creating a “digital twin” of a synagogue and a visual animated model of a building at risk of physical destruction (author: Professor Jan Lutteroth). The advancement of this subject within the new international Opt3D project for the development of cross-border research into endangered architectural heritage, which also involved four synagogues from Ukraine.
The official opening of the exhibition was accompanied by music: Kyiv violinist, vocalist and member of the Gos_orchestra symphony orchestra Adel Kontorovych performed traditional Hasidic melodies — nigunim — creating an extraordinary emotional atmosphere.
The exhibition was presented on the eve of two important dates: the beginning of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, and the anniversary of the Holocaust tragedy at Babyn Yar. This connects the idea of the exhibition with lost Jewish cultural heritage and the shared effort to restore it to contemporary use and historical memory.
The exhibition is on view from 8 September to 10 October 2026 at 20 Bulvarno-Kudriavska Street, Kyiv city.
A trilingual exhibition website has also been created, allowing the exhibition to be viewed online: https://gemaltegebete.eu/
EXHIBITION CURATOR: Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, Professor Yevhen Kotliar
AUTHORIAL TEAM: Professor Stefan Hoppe, Institute of Art History, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany),Professor Alexandra Lipinska, Institute of Art History, University of Cologne (Germany), University of Wrocław (Poland),Professor Yevhen Kotliar, Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, National Academy of Arts of Ukraine,
Dr Mykola Kushnir, Chernivtsi Museum of the History and Culture of Bukovynian Jews, Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University,
Dr Jan Lutteroth, Institute of Architecture, Mainz University, Johann Gottfried Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Marburg (Germany),
Dr Andreas Pfützner, Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies, University of Cologne (Germany)
IN COOPERATION WITH: SKEIRON, Lviv city
TRANSLATION: Dr Oksana Kozyr-Fedotova, Dr Mykola Kushnir
DESIGN: Jeanette Bonefeld, Yulianna Vishchak
DIGITAL REALISATION OF THE EXHIBITION: Aliona Barkalovahttps://gemaltegebete.eu/
FINANCIAL SUPPORT:Ukraine Art Aid Center (UAAC)Böckler-Mare-Balticum-StiftungBeit Dan Jewish Cultural Centre, Kharkiv city