REFLECTIONS ON THE DURA EUROPOS SYNAGOGUE PAINTINGS:
The Annual Israel Heritage Room Lecture
CO-SPONSORS- JEWISH STUDIES PROGRAM
ISRAEL HERITAGE ROOM Committee of the Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs
5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
In 244/45 CE, a small Jewish community in Dura Europos, located at the edges of the Roman and Sasanian empires, commissioned a stunning series of biblically-themed wall paintings to adorn the walls of their synagogue. Following the Sasanian sack of Dura, the synagogue was abandoned and forgotten, until its rediscovery by archaeologists in the 1930s and subsequent reinstallation in the National Museum in Damascus. Weaving in reflections from her recent trips to Syria, this talk will explore the incredible biblical subject matter in the Dura synagogue paintings and their
later reception in both Damascus and Pittsburgh. Jill Joshowitz is a scholar of Jewish visual culture in the late antique Eastern Mediterranean and the author of Visual Exemplars: The Art of Biblical Figures in Jewish Art and Literature in Late Antiquity (Brill, 2025). She has curated exhibitions for Jewish cultural institutions throughout the United States including the Maltz Museum, Museum of Jewish Heritage, and the Yeshiva University Museum.