“A ‘dress rehearsal’ for what future?”: Jewish chaplains in European synagogues, 1944–1945

This article explores the spatial and symbolic relationship between Allied Jewish chaplains and the desecrated synagogues of West and Central Europe between 1944 and 1945. It argues that ruined architecture served as one way that Jewish chaplains processed the totality of the Holocaust and imagined the post-war Jewish future. The chaplains’ early narratives from France and Italy often framed the rededication of synagogues as a “dress rehearsal” for moral and political restoration. However, as the military rabbis moved into Germany and the Netherlands, their rhetoric shifted from restoration to salvage. By documenting Nazi “deviance” through the “excremental assault” on sacred spaces and witnessing the demographic dissonance in reopened houses of worship, many rabbis began to describe these sites as liminal. The article demonstrates how the chaplains used the damaged landscape to envision how Jews would see, and be seen, in a post-war world.