On September 8, 2026, an exhibition opened in Kyiv, the title of which initially seems almost chamber-like: “Painted Prayers. Endangered Painting in the Synagogues of Ukrainian Bukovina” — translated from Ukrainian as “Painted Prayers. Synagogue Paintings of Ukrainian Bukovina at Risk”.
Author: Alexander Khmelnitsky
In fact, the story here is much more than a few old walls and photographs. It is about the Jewish world of Bukovina, which for decades was destroyed, disappeared, rebuilt, silenced, and now it is literally being reassembled — through paintings, architecture, old images, digital models, and the work of young artists.
The exhibition opened in the Grand Hall of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine on Bulvarno-Kudryavska, 20. It runs from September 8 to October 10, 2026. The National Academy of Arts of Ukraine is the main source of information for this material.
And I think something else is fundamental. The National Academy speaks of these monuments specifically as Jewish heritage of Ukraine and emphasizes the significance of the project for Ukrainian culture.
Not “traces of a foreign people on the country’s territory.” Not “exoticism of former Bukovina.” Their heritage, which must be saved.
This difference in wording explains a lot.
The exhibition was detailed by the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, which published material on September 11, 2026, about the opening of the project, its participants, the history of the study of Bukovina synagogues, and new technologies for preserving paintings. The Academy provides the composition of the Ukrainian-German team, talks about working with the synagogue in Novoselytsia, creating its digital model, the participation of young Ukrainian artists, and the further route of the exhibition. The full message from the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine can be read here.
Not only art historians were present at the opening
The project was presented by the leadership of the National Academy. At the opening, the president of the NAM of Ukraine Victor Sydorenko, first vice-president Valery Bitaev, vice-presidents Yuriy Vakulenko and Oles Sanin, academic secretary of the department of art synthesis Nikolai Yakovlev spoke.
They talked about the combination of scientific work, art, and new technologies, as well as the international composition of the team. The Academy separately notes the role of the curator — Professor Yevhen Kotlyar, a corresponding member of the NAM of Ukraine, who has been studying art Judaica and synagogue art for many years.
This is an important name for the whole story because the current Kyiv exhibition did not arise from scratch.
Kotlyar worked on the topic of Bukovina synagogues together with the Chernivtsi Museum of the History and Culture of Bukovina Jews, whose director is Nikolai Kushnir. The result of that work was a bilingual catalog and a series of traveling exhibitions that were shown in various cities of Ukraine back in 2016–2017.
So this is not a project invented yesterday for another commemorative date. This line of research has been going on for at least a decade, and the current stage has simply become much more technological and international.
2016, 2023, 2025, 2026: how the project was assembled
The next point is October 2023.
Then, on the initiative of the Ukraine Art Aid Center, a Ukrainian-German working group was formed. The center is headed by Dr. Johannes Nathan. The task was extremely practical: to find modern ways to preserve the Jewish heritage of Ukraine, which is threatened with physical destruction in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The work of the group was coordinated by Professor Stefan Hoppe. The German exhibition version was curated by Professor Alexandra Lipinska.
Then the project moved out of research offices.
In November 2025, the exhibition was first shown at the University and City Library of Cologne. After Cologne, it began traveling around Germany. At the time of the opening of the Kyiv exhibition, the German version was in Düsseldorf, with further plans for Augsburg, Marburg, and other cities.
And in parallel, a Ukrainian route emerged.
The first exhibition of the project in Ukraine opened at the National Academy of Arts. Yevhen Kotlyar called this, in essence, recognition of the significance of the topic for Ukrainian culture.
Here, perhaps, the main idea of the whole story arises. Jewish synagogues of Bukovina are not being returned to Ukraine from outside. They have always been part of the history of this land. Just part of this history lay too long under plaster, behind closed doors, or in old archives.
Four exhibitions within one
The organizers specifically designed the space so that the visitor goes through four interconnected blocks, rather than just looking at a set of beautiful photographs.
The first is the historical and cultural context and material environment of the life of Bukovina Jews. That is, the viewer is first explained who lived here, in what environment the communities existed, and why these buildings appeared at all.
The second block is dedicated to the architecture of synagogues and the reconstruction of iconographic programs of paintings. Modern photographs stand next to historical images, reconstruction drawings, texts, and painted copies of lost or damaged fragments.
The third shows what is happening with this heritage today. Students of the Department of Monumental Painting of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts do not just look at old walls in lectures. Anna Shcherbakova and Tatyana Zamnius practically studied them and created painted reconstructions. Vadim Koltun, now living in Germany, uses plots, motifs, and ornamentation of synagogue paintings in his own work.
The fourth block is technology. Laser scanning, digital twin, three-dimensional fixation, and an animated model of a building that may not survive the next decades physically.
And it is here that Novoselytsia appears.
The synagogue where the paintings were found — and almost immediately realized they could be lost
The synagogue in Novoselytsia, Chernivtsi region, became one of the central objects of the entire exhibition.
At the opening, this was discussed by human rights activist and former dissident Iosif Zisels, head of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine and executive vice-president of the Congress of National Communities of Ukraine.
According to him, the unique paintings of the semi-destroyed Novoselytsia synagogue were revealed about fifteen years ago. But their discovery did not mean salvation. On the contrary, it became clear that the discovered heritage was in an extremely vulnerable state. The Academy uses a very harsh wording: the paintings were revealed and simultaneously practically “doomed.”
Now they are trying to at least accurately record this synagogue.
As part of the project, three-dimensional images and an animated model of the building were created. The work was carried out in cooperation with the Institute of Architecture of the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz and the Ukrainian company Skeiron.
The methodology for creating a digital twin and working with laser scanning is presented by Professor Jan Lutteroth. Moreover, the current project has already received continuation in the international program Opt3D, dedicated to cross-border research of architectural monuments at risk. It includes four synagogues from Ukraine.
For readers of NANews, this story is not new. Back on February 2, 2025, we showed in detail how Ukrainian specialists digitize Bukovina synagogues and why their digital twin is needed at all.
Ukrainian experts digitized Bukovina synagogues with unique paintings — you can already watch
And on July 4, 2026, we returned to this topic more broadly — in a material about the attempt to preserve Jewish monuments of Ukraine in digital form before some of them are physically lost.
Now the continuation of that work is visible. Scanning did not remain a technological experiment for a couple of beautiful 3D models. It has entered museum, research, and educational work.
Who exactly is making “Painted Prayers”
Behind the exhibition is a rather large international team, and it is worth listing them here precisely because it shows the scale of the work.
The authorship team included Stefan Hoppe from the Institute of Art History at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich; Alexandra Lipinska, associated with the Institute of Art History at the University of Cologne and the University of Wrocław; Yevhen Kotlyar from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts and the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.
Also in the team is Nikolai Kushnir — Chernivtsi Museum of the History and Culture of Bukovina Jews and Chernivtsi National University named after Yuriy Fedkovych; Jan Lutteroth — Institute of Architecture in Mainz and the Johann Gottfried Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg; Andreas Pfutzner — Martin Buber Institute for Judaic Studies at the University of Cologne.
The Ukrainian technical partner was the Lviv-based Skeiron.
Translations were done by Oksana Kozyr-Fedotova and Nikolai Kushnir. The design was developed by Jeanette Bonefeld and Yulianna Vishchak, and the digital implementation of the exhibition was carried out by Alyona Barkalova.
The work was funded by the Ukraine Art Aid Center, Böckler-Mare-Balticum-Stiftung, and the Jewish cultural center “Beit-Dan” in Kharkiv.
When you see all these names and organizations together, it becomes harder to call what is happening simply “an exhibition about synagogues.” It is already a system: a historian finds and explains the object, an architect records it, an artist reconstructs it, a digital specialist creates a model, and a student takes this visual language into their work a few years later.
This is how culture continues to live. Not by itself, unfortunately. Someone pulls it out of a crumbling building with their hands every time.
Zisels and Finberg: there is also a story of Jewish revival in Ukraine
In Kyiv, not only Iosif Zisels spoke.
Leonid Finberg — sociologist, director of the Center for the Study of the History and Culture of East European Jewry, and chief editor of the publishing house “Dukh i Litera” — also spoke.
The National Academy of Arts especially notes that Zisels and Finberg were active participants in the Jewish revival in Ukraine from the first years of independence and played an important role in the institutionalization of Jewish public and cultural life in the country.
Finberg spoke about the need to continue publishing scientific books on Jewish artistic heritage. He also reminded of the studies of Jewish art that Ukrainian scientists were engaged in back in the 1920s–1930s.
This detail breaks another too simple story. As if the study of Jewish heritage in Ukraine appeared only today, as a result of European grants or new memory policies. No. There were researchers before the war, there were attempts to study this in the 20th century, there were people who rebuilt Jewish public life after Ukraine regained independence in 1991.
And today this process no longer looks marginal.
It takes place in the hall of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.
NANews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency
Jews in Ukraine — not guests who arrived yesterday
Here I will separate the author’s assessment from the Academy’s message.
You cannot speak for all Ukrainian Jews: “they feel at home” — and put a period. Everyone has their own biography. There is tragic family memory, emigration, the Holocaust, Soviet anti-Semitism, old and new conflicts. It would be untrue to smooth everything over with one beautiful phrase.
But there is another criterion of home, and it is much more serious than a slogan.
Whose history is considered part of the country’s history?
If the paintings of a Jewish synagogue in a small town in Bukovina are studied by Ukrainian scientists; if the Ukrainian art academy trains students on them; if the state National Academy of Arts calls them the Jewish heritage of Ukraine; if a Ukrainian company scans a crumbling building for future restoration — then Jews here are not museum “aliens.”
Their culture is embedded in the history of the country because it was created here.
This is not a gift to Jews from modern Ukraine. No one “allows” this history to become Ukrainian. It already was — just historical memory too often cut out pieces that did not fit into a convenient scheme.
Bukovina is especially ruthless to such schemes. In one region, different languages, religions, states, and cultures intersected for centuries. Separating the Jewish part from this history so that everything else remains intact is impossible. It will already be another, artificially truncated Bukovina.
Young artists are more important than another memorial plaque
I think the work of Anna Shcherbakova, Tatyana Zamnius, and Vadim Koltun speaks more about the future of the project than ceremonial speeches.
Why?
Because a monument can be conserved — and forgotten. You can open a memorial plaque, take photos, report, and then walk past again.
Something else is happening here. A young Ukrainian artist studies the principle of constructing Jewish synagogue painting, tries to restore a lost part, understands symbols and ornament. At some point, what was considered the heritage of the past already enters their own professional experience.
From this moment, the boundary “their culture — our culture” begins to crumble on its own.
Not because someone declared a year of tolerance. Just a student of the art academy works with this material as part of the cultural environment they need to know.
This is the integration of memory, not a poster about it.
From Bukovina to Podolia: this is already becoming a map of Ukraine
Moreover, Bukovina is not an isolated case.
Just a few days ago, on September 10, 2026, NANews reported on a large expedition across Jewish Podolia: researchers surveyed more than 30 historical synagogues in Ukraine.
When you put Podolia and Bukovina side by side, the geography begins to change. Before us is no longer a few preserved “Jewish objects.” A whole network of towns and villages is visible, where Jewish life was part of the usual urban fabric.
The synagogue stood there not in a parallel reality. People came out of it onto the same street as everyone else.
This simple thing is sometimes lost behind the word “heritage.”
The war made this work urgent
The project has a reason to hurry, and the National Academy formulates it completely openly.
The Ukrainian-German group was created in 2023 specifically to find ways to save Jewish monuments under the threat of physical destruction during the Russian-Ukrainian war.
So the digital twin today is not a fashionable museum toy.
There is a building. There is a painting. There is a war. There is the usual aging of structures, lack of sufficient funds, decades of previous neglect. And no one can guarantee what state this object will be in five or ten years.
NANews has already compiled a separate chronology of Jewish objects in Ukraine damaged or destroyed as a result of Russian aggression.
Destroyed and damaged by Russian aggression Jewish objects in Ukraine
Therefore, the phrase “manage to save” now sounds literally.
If it is not possible to preserve the physical wall, data, images, dimensions, the location of paintings, and scientific description must remain. So that after the war there is at least a possibility to return to restoration, and not start from scratch and a few random photographs.
Why the opening was done right now
The date was also not chosen by chance.
The Academy directly links the September presentation with two events: the approach of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and the anniversary of the mass killings in Babi Yar.
One calendar marker speaks of the continuation of life, the other — of the attempt to destroy this life.
Between them is an exhibition about a culture that still did not disappear.
At the opening, Kyiv violinist and vocalist Adel Kontorovich, a member of the symphonic Gos_orchestra, performed. She played traditional Hasidic melodies — nigunim. The National Academy separately notes that this music became part of the overall emotional structure of the evening.
And here the story unexpectedly stops being just about walls.
When the nigun sounds again in Kyiv, and young artists nearby show reconstructions of the murals of the Bukovinian synagogue, it is not quite a memorial for a vanished culture.
Culture is being used again.
For Israel, this is also a family story.
From Israel, such an exhibition can easily be seen as just another European heritage preservation project. And that would be a mistake.
For the Israeli reader, the names Chernivtsi, Novoselytsia, Kyiv, Podolia, Zhytomyr, Odessa often sound different than for a European tourist. Behind them lies family geography — the birthplace of a grandfather, the story of a great-grandmother, the city from which someone left for Eretz Yisrael, a surname on an old photograph.
We write a lot about this in our section about Jews from Ukraine. And every time the same problem arises: Israel remembers the people well, but not always the environment from which they came.
Synagogue murals return precisely the environment.
Not just a list of the deceased. Not just a photograph of a rabbi. Not just a memorial.
The walls show what the visual world of the Jewish community was like, what people saw in front of them during prayer, what artistic language they created. And if this language is preserved today in Ukraine, it directly concerns Israel, where the descendants of that world live.
Germany, Ukraine, and Jewish heritage — a difficult but important construction.
There is another layer in the current project that should not be overlooked.
It is Ukrainian-German.
The first exhibition is held in Cologne, then Düsseldorf, with Augsburg and Marburg ahead. German universities participate in research and digital documentation. German and Ukrainian specialists work together to preserve monuments of Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
No exhibition can ‘close’ the Holocaust, and it would be strange to try to see a beautiful historical reconciliation with a ready-made finale here.
But history does not provide ready-made finales.
It provides the next action.
Today, this action becomes the joint work to ensure that another Jewish synagogue does not disappear without a trace.
“They lived at home.”
It seems to me that this is exactly what the entire exhibition leads to.
The Jews of Bukovina were not a temporary population that once passed through Ukrainian land and left behind interesting ornaments. Here was their everyday life. Here they built communities and buildings, created art, prayed, raised children.
After them, the walls remained.
The Soviet period, the Holocaust, emigration, border changes, and the current war turned many of these walls into ruins. Now sometimes it is necessary to save at least their digital geometry.
But there is an important change.
In modern Ukraine, there is less and less need to explain why it is necessary to preserve a Jewish synagogue as part of Ukrainian heritage. The National Academy of Arts talks about this almost routinely: this is Jewish heritage of Ukraine, it is important for Ukrainian culture and needs to be studied, shown, and saved.
Perhaps this is what a normal attitude towards shared history looks like.
Not pretending that there were never conflicts, anti-Semitism, or catastrophes in it. Not rewriting the past in convenient colors. But also not pushing Jews out of the country’s history, leaving them only a separate chapter about the Holocaust.
There was life before the Holocaust. After it, life continued too.
Today, Iosif Zisels and Leonid Finberg stand in the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine and talk about preserving Jewish culture. Yevhen Kotlyar has been studying synagogue painting for many years. Mykola Kushnir works with the heritage of the Jews of Bukovina. Ukrainian Skeiron scans the synagogue in Novoselytsia. Kharkiv students restore its painting.
This is no longer a story about ‘once Jews lived here.’
They lived here at home. Their culture is woven into the history of Ukraine, not glued to it on the side.
And perhaps one of the most important changes of recent decades is that today this thought no longer needs to be proven with loud words. Sometimes it is enough to see who is saving the old murals from the wall.