USAFA's Jewish Chapel

HERITAGE MINUTE

The Jewish Chapel shares the downstairs area of the Cadet Chapel with the Catholic and Buddhist worship spaces. ----more----

The architecture is a circle within a square, symbolizing a tent, and paying tribute to the global mission of the Air Force and the everlasting presence of God. Mr. Ludwig Wolpert of the New York Jewish Museum designed the chapel interior. The Chapel seats 100. Its walls are made of panels of translucent glass separated by stanchions of Israeli cypress. Normally, paintings of human images are not found in Jewish synagogues, but the Academy is different, as it features the nine-painting set created by Shlomo Katz. The works of art, painted in 1985 and 1986, depict biblical stories of brotherhood, flight, and justice. Mr. Katz painted the scenes on wooden panels that he had pre-curved to precisely fit on the curved walls of the chapel. The floor of the foyer is made of 1,631 pieces of Jerusalem brown stone donated by the Israeli Defense Forces in 1960. The foyer walls are made of purple stained-glass panels alternating with green and blue stained glass accent windows. The foyer also houses a Torah Scroll that is more than 200 years old. It was among 38 scrolls discovered in an abandoned factory in Poland, part of a collection of religious artifacts that the Nazis had accumulated to put in a museum to show the world remnants of an “extinct people.” Donated to the Jewish Chapel in April 1990, the “Holocaust Torah” is dedicated to the memory of all those murdered by the Nazis, and those who fought against the Nazis.

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