 We have Aaron Goldberg, who's a member of the Friends of the Mural, Los Chulm Mural, and a co-founder of the organization and the group that saved this magnificent piece of art. And just as a quick background, this will probably be our third show about it, because I remember we were videotaping on site as it was being planned and the removal and then the moving to the current home. Thanks for being on the show again. Thank you for having me. It's great. I'm grateful to be here for your inaugural show again. Yeah, yeah, it's great to be back on the air, and it's such an exciting project. And you know, I mean, I have no Rick Kirschner, and I've been, you know, I keep abreast of what things as they go on and the cleaning and then just recently in the annual report from the Preservation Trust, they highlighted on the first page the fact that you guys have been doing so much work and that you're moving along. Aaron, could you tell, if you want to tell us a little more about yourself and how you got involved in the project. And I was just shocked to learn before we got on the air that you've known about the mural since the 1980s. Could you tell us a little about that? Yeah. I am a Burlingtonian, and my family came from Lithuania in the 1880s, and I got involved in archival work relating to the Jewish community with Myron Samuelson, who was an attorney in Burlington, Vermont, and had done a lot of work and wrote a book about the Burlington's Jewish community, which was published in 1976. And he was the archivist at that point and through the 80s. And I then succeeded him as the archivist for Hava Zedek. In my high school days, I remember seeing the Harry Will Carpent Master warehouse on Hyde Street, which was one of the successor businesses to the High Autumn Synagogue, and I am putting up a slide now, which is the High Autumn Synagogue building. Oh, we can pull that up. Which is slide number two, yes? So that building was the second synagogue in Burlington, and may I see this on this screen too? Oh, sure. I think we... Here we go. So what you're looking at is the second synagogue in Burlington. The first one was a Hava Zedek synagogue in 1885, and then High Autumn Synagogue split off from the synagogue, from the first synagogue in 1889, and it was built by the Levin family. And this is now owned, the building is now owned by the Offenhearts family, who have been tremendous supporters of the Los Reales Project, including Stephen Offenhearts, his wife, Susan, and his wife, and his, I'm sorry, and his brother, Adam. And so what you're seeing is this is the entire, the whole synagogue building, and this east-facing apps is where the Ark that held the Torah scrolls would have been in place. What you see here that's still covered is a slate roof, and we actually built a building around this building, and to remove a mural that's inside of the building, and the mural was painted by this gentleman, Benzion Black, and you can see this is the Ark that was in the apps, and this is the actual mural at the top. So where's this photo from? This photo is from 1910, it is the only black and white photo we have of the inside of the building showing the mural in place in 1910. And Benzion Black was a wonderful person, kind of a Renaissance man, he was a theatrical producer, he cast his wife in a play in Lithuania, her name was Rachel Sager, and she then came to America and he followed her to America because he was in love with her, and they married here, and they had children here, and their grandchildren are involved in the project also, and supporters of the project. And his family paid for some of the Benzion Black's descendants, paid his daughters, paid for our archival slides from 1986, which we have of the mural. And what you're seeing though is that this is all painted on plaster at the top, and you can see that these are prayer walls, and this genre is the genre of the wooden synagogues that were all over Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. And there were hundreds, if not well over a thousand of them, in Lithuania there were 600 wooden synagogues alone that we know were destroyed. We don't know how many of those had murals. Typically with these murals in Eastern Europe, the artists that did them is unknown, there's no photographs of them, and they've been lost to the sands of time. Probably one member of the synagogue, probably, or who knows, itinerant painters. Right, they could have been itinerant painters from the town, or from the synagogue, or hires who went from place to place. Black was a trained artist in doing three dimensionality, and colors and perspective. Yes, in Trompe-Loi, he also was a musician and a singer and a poet. He was a promoter of the Yiddish culture and Yiddish language. He thought the Yiddish language should be the primary language of Jews, and was then in Europe. Yiddish was generally the first language of the residents in Lithuania, certainly. And anyway, when he came to Vermont, he was promoting Yiddish as a culture. He brought theater down from Montreal and up from New York, and he wrote hundreds of poems in Yiddish that we have at the UVM Special Collections. And we also have his record collection of Yiddish music. He was a composer and a director of music. He had a Mandolin band in Vermont. Anyway, it was terrific, so there's a lot of background information. We have a huge amount of information on this, gentlemen. And this is the, this is inside, that's right. So this is the warehouse that that Harry Will Carpetmaster had his business, which was the synagogue building. The synagogue was a synagogue from 1910 to 19, from 1889 to 1939. And the this is now has been recognized as a symbol of all of these lost wooden synagogue murals that were all over Eastern Europe, and most of which have not survived. And it's a fantastic example of of this genre. And so from 1939 to 1986, I mean, that was just in the warehouse. It was it. It happened to glance up. So from 30 was, yes. So from 39 to 50, the synagogue was functioning through 39. And then after 39, it was still functioning also as an Orthodox synagogue. They were all Orthodox synagogues back then as an adjunct building of a Havazetic synagogue. So Havazetic was had the brick building, the red brick building on Archibald on Archibald. And then this building is literally two doors down on Hyde Street from the other building. And this was according to our our recent interviewees. People do remember that they attended services in this building as late as 1952, which is the year that Havazetic then moved up the hill to North Prospect Street. And then this was then deeded over to to the to then out the Havazetic building became the Havath Geron building. The Chayatum was still in place and it was then sold as a business. And so it became a feed business, dry goods business. And then Harry Wiel, who was a carpet master, had it in his warehouse. And I remember going into the warehouse and on the on the this is facing east, facing west was the prayer gallery. And he had women's prayer gallery that would have been in the back because the men would have prayed in the front and it was higher floor up. And they were looking the directly at the women would be praying and looking directly at the mural probably 50 feet back. But what's pretty astonishing is that not only was this painted, but all the prayer, this is where you saw the prayer walls at the first floor. That's right. And but he also painted the entire ceiling from above the mural this way, all the way back to the women's prayer gallery. And it was heaven. It was the blue sky. It was clouds. It was Jerubim. It was musical instruments. And it's so this is the part that survives. We have this piece here that we've taken out separately to exhibit. And then we move this entire piece, which is pretty amazing. So that started now fast forwarding. Yes. Yes. So so what happens is is that in the wall, the mural is walled up in 1986 to protect it because the building is then going to be converted into an apartment building. And the the the Francis family was very cooperative at that point in time. And they agreed that we could erect a false wall in front of it. So with the assistance of Richard Kirschner and our we've had a we have a wonderful team that is in place still. So it's Richard Kirschner as a coordinating conservator. Marcel Bodin, who is an architect myself as as an archivist. Jeff Potash is an archivist. Bob Neld, who was an engineer on a project and ventures. The all great preservation of Schwartz, general northern construction. Ray O'Connor, who's a master carpenter on the project. And anyway, so you can see we put this this fake wall up. And tenants were actually in the building from 1986 through 2010 in an apartment. And this is the walls of the apartment and this is behind it. And what happened, though, was when the wall was put up, crews put in insulation behind the wall. And the we didn't know at that time, but the insulation was placed in a manner where the insulation was against the face of the mural. So condensation condensed in the insulation. A warm cold space. That's right. And transferred to the face of the mural. So we actually sustained about 10 to 12 percent damage of the paint. But certainly, but we have before we moved it, we took archival slides of it in 1986, which I'm not going to show at this point. Although the warehouse slide that I showed you isn't and the and the other one is also from from the original slide group. This is a picture of opening it up in 2010. And you can see areas of loss. Yes, so that you can see some areas of loss. And you can see in the in the small one, this is from 86. There's very little damage on this one. But I have a bigger shot of that. But you can see how close this was six inches. The struts are six inches in front of the main the main picture of of the mural. So we're we are in 2012. We then work. Yes, so we work with the often arts family. They agree to lease the building, at least the apartment to us and to make some major changes to their building. We build a building around the building and I remember that. That's when we first started running the video. We did our first coverage of it. When I first discovered it and heard about it was then. So when we're when we lease the apartment, we have a conservator to who is a wonderful conservator. Her name is Constance Baker and Constance is going in. And you can see that she's using very fine brushes and she's literally gluing all these paint chips that are hanging like potato chips off of the wall back on to the plaster. And the plaster is pressed onto lathboard. And the lathboard each lathboard cross strut functions like a piano key. So the conservator is actually pressing the plaster on based upon the flex of the lathboard. And so this is Connie working on gluing the pieces on. And she eventually gets it to look very much like this. And this is actually before the mural is cut out. Right. So it's still in place. Still in place. And this is now but it's covered. You can see this very white milky shroud on it. And so all of the all the paint was stabilized in order for us to move it by having this this this coat that off gas once we opened it up back at the other build at the new building. And so so you can see there was some and we'll talk about these color changes. These side pieces. Yes. So right. So this one did not survive the original conversion of the building in 1986. This one did survive and was in the in the building when the often hearts were showing it to us and generously letting us have access to the lease to the least space and the building. And we actually had to move walls in his in the apartment and take off the roof of their building and put it back on. Which meant taking a slate off in the boards and getting to the roof and operating it from front to back. This is just to highlight Black was a specialist in gold leaf. He this is part of part of his work. There is gold leaf embedded in the painting, but he was a sign painter on Center Street in Burlington just below where the Daily Planet is. He operated a successful sign painting business called Be Black Signs of a Better Kind from when he got here to through 1972 when he died. Oh, wow. And there are many of the buildings that are many of the signs downtown that are in professionals and commercial space that are by him. Oh, wow. And and they have inset gold leaf. He also worked on the state house, a capital and the gold leaf on the state house. OK. So this is just a picture of and we'll go through these very quickly. There's your building around the building. Right. So this is the building around the building that and this building was heated and it has these large windows so that steel can be passed through. Steel beams can be passed through to the welders inside. You can see that this is a picture of the slate that we're taking off by pieces and numbers. And they're all numbered and lettered and put back in the off and hard garage building so they can be put back on. The there's a roof that is put on that that is a mobile roof. And I don't have a slide of that, but we took the roof off. Out of the way. That's right. In order to bring in in order to take the mural out. And then put it back on the same day. And so this is a steel frame that is designed by engineering ventures. And you can see this goes all the way around it. And the and this the mural is then that's the cribbing supporting the mural inside the steel frame. That's right. So there's about seven layers between and the the mural is actually the very tiniest part against right there against the wood. You can see this lathe board right here and that's the mural in front of it. It's about three quarters of an inch wide at the bottom and literally a sixteenth of an inch wide in the center because the plaster was falling as he was painting. Sure. Oh, yeah. The and this shows the and the mural was moved by it was picked up by a crane deposit on the truck. The truck is then brought and passes in front of the old synagogue up to the new building on Prospect Street where the crane is also lifting it. Construction is being done at both sites at the same time. Because you had to open up the synagogue lobby had to be opened, which is now the public lobby for the lost mural. And it is open to the public subject to COVID restrictions. And the but in in the as we're planning to cut it out of the old place, we're then putting it in the new place in putting in I beams, a suspension rod so it can be then placed hoisted hoisted up. So I'm just going to show some other slides. This is so from 2000 and so, yeah, we're fast forwarding again. Yes, we are. So after it after it's moved and actually I'll go to this one first. So this is the there it is. This is the mural after 2015. And this is and between 2015, the lost mural project became a nonprofit. It decided it kept planning on how to do this to do with it now. And whether, you know, how and how we could restore it, how we could clean it. An expert panel was convened in November of 2019 to give us our priorities and give us kind of kind of direction. Yeah, yeah, marching, marching orders. But you can see that this is the lab board right there. And the mural, the plaster is right in front of it. And the same on this side. And the this is the colors of what it looked like and what is amazing. And I'm just going to go back quickly to this one for a second. Yeah, in 1986, you'll see that these red reaps are there. The green drapes were there. And you can see all of this is very, very, very dark, including the lions, the Ten Commandments. You can barely see into the out the window. And what we have, I'm guessing that a varnish. Yes, so there are there are several things going on here. There is two layers of varnish that are applied to the mural. The building was in a building that was heated with charcoal from 1910 through it through 1980 through 1939, at least that we know, openly, at least. And the charcoal dust literally transfigured and transformed the colors. And so this green was green in the preliminary slides. And all this dark, dark color is the aging varnish, which is hardening over time. Yeah, of course, yep. And as it's hardening, that that precipitated the need for us to move forward more quickly than we thought. So by 2019, plans were getting in place in order to have it professionally cleaned. OK, because we had to get the varnish off. And because the varnish had been left, it would have made it completely intractable. Here we go. So this is samples that are being taken of the mural. But you can see that the red, the blue and the purple colors is so incredibly vibrant. Yes. And so now we have a we literally have an image of from the Book of Numbers and the Book of Exodus as to what the tent of the Tabernacle is. The mobile tent of the Tabernacle looked like that housed the Ten Commandments and these colors, the crimson red, the royal blue and the purples are are are recited literally in the Book of Numbers. And we have that in this photo here, too, which is a little bigger. And I don't know if we can zoom in on that and if people are at home can see. But so I'm just going to show colors are incredible. This is a composite, which we'll come to in a moment. But I'm hoping that you can see the colors of this, too. And I'm going to highlight some of these details in a second. But this is a flat composite. It's composed by Eric Bassette, his wife, Jenny Bakers, who was one of the conservators who helped clean the mural. The composite is taken in sections and then seemed together. It makes the mural look completely flattened, right? Yeah, for us to in order for the conservators to study the colors. And when they could zoom into this image, and it's done in several different resolutions, they are able to, with their with their computer magnifier, they can go in and look at the depth of the colors. We also are doing tests with the Historic Paint Analyst and Amy Kohl-Ives, who's telling us exactly which shades are what colors. So there's various shades of red, blues, greens, yellows, browns, and every one of those shades requires a different level of solvent to get through the the varnishes and the charcoal soot and the grime and the dirt. But we have to do that in order to make sure that we are not damaging the original paint. Right, yeah, you want to get to that. It's just like on a microscopic level. That's right, and it's done with microscopy. That's what it's called. And so these are some very fun slides showing the changes. So you'll see that if you take a look, for instance, this was an original test patch for the red and the blue, and that comes up to this color. This shows you how much varnish was covering the entire brown part. Right, because you can see it there. You can see it's all open there, and we couldn't even see it, but you could barely see in the original slides the white detail that he's done. And you can also see all of the curtain pieces are now visible, and so is this bottom part now, which is quite amazing, his scroll work. And this is how the paint is tested. So these little dots are showing you how paint test samples are removed by the conservators, Constance Silver and Jenny Baker, and they're numbered and labeled by color. So this shows you one, which was the original color that they would have started with in April of 2015. Two is with one layer more of solvent applied. Three is another layer of solvent applied. Four is another layer. Five is another layer. And then six is what is the color that we're left with. Essentially what you end up with. That's right. That's right. And the same is true of the browns. You can see on the actual area. So you start at this color, and you get down to this. This break. And incredibly vibrant colors. And you can see, and this is another example of it over here. And the detail it pulls out is incredible. And so they've now established the original colors of the palette that Benzion Black used. So we're very confident that we can replicate the damage based upon the slides that we have that are in place. So that was leading into my next question. So the cleaning now is complete. The cleaning is largely complete. At least 95% at this stage. And the cleaning was completed between April 15th of this last summer and the end of August. And we're now fundraising for the full restoration of the mural. It's estimated to cost about $150,000. We have half the monies in place already in hand or pledged, which is astonishing after we've just finished fundraising for the cleaning also. And we're hoping that people all over the world will see this presentation. And people will forward this to their friends and relatives. And that's been ongoing, right? I mean, there's been a lot of support. Yes. And what's interesting now is that this last round of the cleaning, it has really been confirmed that this is a universal immigrant symbol. As Madeleine Keunen puts it, this is a symbol of freedom over oppression and hope over despair. And all of the Vermont historic preservation community is wholly behind us, fully supporting the project, including Vermont Arts Council, Vermont Humanities Council, Preservation Trust, Preservation Trust of Vermont, Preservation Burlington, and many others that are incredibly helpful, including Vermont Community Foundation. Such a monumental task and an amazing story. It is. It's an incredible story. And it's an incredible and very meaningful that this piece that was a remnant of an orthodox community and of a lost art form that was in Europe is now one of the only one of its kind in the world in terms of its size, scope, and magnitude. People can walk in. People can walk in and see this. And look up and see it the way it was meant to be seen. And that's also what's interesting, because in the 10th of the Tabernacle, originally only the high priesthood were able to go into the interior from the outside courtyard and through these wonderful curtains to get into the interior space. Now, not everybody can. It's kind of democratized the process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the restoration. So we're moving on to the restoration part now, right? The fundraising is happening. And that will be to infill areas of loss. That's right. That's right. So I'm going to go through some of these relatively quickly. So the loss is right here. But you can see that in this one, and here you can still see that the 10 commandments are very dark. And you can see dark varnish over here. And you can see that the pediments are really dark. Also, this are the pediments now on the columns. And you can see they're quite beautiful. And you can also see his amazing technique in terms of making these three-dimensional light and darks and shadowing. And then he's got this marbleizing technique that he's using on the bottom and the top. So on the top of the columns, it's kind of these black painting marks. And on the bottom, it's this white marble pieces that he's painted on in order to create this dimensionality in the piece. And it is trompe l'oeil. You're looking out the tent flaps. And he's made an allusion to the temple in Jerusalem by making four marble columns instead of the wooden acacia poles that would have been used in the time of the Exodus. So this is just showing you more, as you saw in the original slides that we used, that we showed from 86, we couldn't see anything here. It was all brown and gold letters. It's actually coming up red and silver letters. And it's coming up in such detail that you can see the flames going across the front of the mural that are representative of the finger of God carving the commandments, the tablets for Moses. This is, again, the slide from 86, showing you how dark this whole thing is. And whoops, I'm going to just go back this way for a second and see that and see how light that is and how much detail is brought out. So this is the scaffolding in place this summer. This, again, shows you the various steps. The detail. And you can see that this is the marble that I was talking about for the pillars. It's a marbleized in the column. But look at the line. And the line, yeah, the shading on the line. This line has had its second cleaning. This one has had a first cleaning. This tablet has had a second cleaning, and this one had not been cleaned yet. So the exciting thing for me is we're running down on time, so I want to thank you for coming in. Obviously, there's more work to be done, so we're going to be following up, and we're going to be following. And half of the money there, that's great, but you always can use more help. So people that are watching, hopefully, they'll get excited. This is the composites to what we have now, and it's really quite astonishing in terms of how much has been accomplished this summer. Thanks for coming in. Thanks so much. And really, I mean, this is the show. We're back on the air. I want to thank Aaron Goldberg for coming in to share all this stuff with us. You're visibly excited about it for really good reasons. We all are. I know, it's really so great. And very supportive community, both statewide and internationally. I really, I'd like to thank everybody again for tuning in. We're happy to be back on the air at live at 525 in Preservation Burlington. Remember, for more information on your house, your town, or that marker you always wanted, go to preservationburlington.org. We dropped the WWW beforehand. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks, Aaron. My pleasure.