“I never thought about giving up, because that’s not in my nature,” Carol Clingan ’63 says of her epic effort to save a historic Jewish mural. “But there was a long time when I thought I couldn’t do it.” More than 10 years ago, during a project to create a photographic index of Massachusetts synagogues and their memorial plaques, Carol had learned about the mural, which hung on an attic wall in a North Adams, Mass., apartment building that had once served as a temple for local Lithuanian Jews. When Congregation Beth Israel moved to a bigger space, in 1920, the mural—25 feet by 5 feet and weighing about 2,000 pounds—was left behind.
Upon first seeing the artwork, Carol recalls, “My instinct was: We’d better save it.”
Filled with Hebrew text and traditional Jewish symbols of tablets and lions, the striking mural—painted in pastel by Noah Levin, a Lithuanian artist commissioned by the congregation and brought to North Adams in the 1890s—also includes two American flags. The composition “really tells you something about the immigrant generation in this country,” Carol says. “They wanted to be Americans, and they wanted to be Jewish.”
The effort to restore and find a home for the mural would take longer, cost more, and prove harder than she had anticipated. But her persistence got her to the people who would help. To handle the budget, timetable, and contractors, Carol enlisted Judith Cannon, a project manager she knew from her synagogue. To repair, restore, and move the delicate mural would cost about $450,000, of which Carol had raised about $50,000. Luckily, in her weekly online Talmud class, she knew Sheldon Buckler, a former research scientist and senior executive at Polaroid who shared her enthusiasm. “He was mad for the mural,” Carol says. “He loved it.”
Buckler’s generosity gave instant credibility to the feasibility of the project and paved the way for others to get behind the effort. Thanks to Cannon’s prep work, the physical work took only two months. On Oct. 30, 2024, the mural left its old home. It now hangs in the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. “I don’t think there’s another place on Earth that would have been more perfect,” Carol says.
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