Through mid-September, at the Arsenale Nord in Venice, a synagogue will float above the lagoon. It is Nabatele, a work by artist and architect Anna Kamyshan presented as a collateral event of the 61st Venice Biennale within the Yiddishland Pavilion. Brought to the Biennale by the Montreal Jewish Museum (MJM), the installation is a helium-filled balloon that can rise to a height of 25 meters. The upper part replicates a wooden synagogue from Eastern Europe, while from below it appears as a suspended rock, evoking roots and fragments of stone. When the wind blows, it descends until it skims the water; on calm days, it remains suspended high in the air. The image of the synagogue torn from its place of origin is the symbolic heart of the work, but its existence also depends on a complex engineering feat. Before becoming a metaphor for memory, loss, and continuity, Nabatele was a technical challenge solved through intensive structural design, calculations, and fabrication. This tension between lightness and solidity reflects the very nature of the project: speaking about what is fragile and lost requires a structure capable of supporting it.
Anna Kamyshan, born into a Jewish family in Lviv and now living between London and New York, has also worked on the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv. Curators Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks bring complementary perspectives to the project: Veits’s is rooted in feminist and decolonial studies, while Fiks has been committed for years to promoting Yiddish culture in contemporary art. Particularly significant is the Montreal Jewish Museum’s decision to support a work dedicated to the wooden synagogues of Eastern Europe, almost all of which were destroyed in the 20th century. It is not a Polish, Ukrainian, or Israeli institution that is promoting their memory, but a museum of the Diaspora. Alyssa Stokvis-Hauer, artistic director of the MJM, explains that the museum’s role was that of a partner to the artist and curators rather than merely an official organizer. She notes that Montreal has long been one of the main centers of Yiddish culture, making a collaboration with the Yiddishland Pavilion a natural fit.
For the museum, Nabatele perfectly embodies its mission: preserving Jewish heritage by reinterpreting it through new artistic forms. According to Stokvis-Hauer, memory and innovation are not alternatives, but processes that reinforce one another. The museum aims to be a space where everyone can engage with the complexity of the Jewish experience, and Kamyshan’s work embodies this vision on an international scale, just as the institution prepares for a major renovation of its spaces. The project also gave rise to Synagogue Stories, a digital platform developed in collaboration with the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (MEIS) and the POLIN Museum in Warsaw. The resource collects and brings together the stories of synagogues in Montreal, Italy, and the former Residence Zone, creating a shared narrative that transcends geographical boundaries.
The central question is who preserves memory when the original sites no longer exist. For the Montreal Jewish Museum, the answer lies in the Diaspora: the history of the destroyed synagogues lives on wherever the descendants of the communities that built and attended them are found. Montreal is one such place, because the city’s Jewish heritage includes precisely those families who carry this memory with them. Memory, therefore, does not belong exclusively to the places of loss, but to the people who keep it alive. The wooden synagogues of Eastern Europe, however, were not merely architectural heritage. They were part of societies marked by political tensions, poverty, socialist movements, Zionism, assimilation, and persecution. The Shoah did not merely erase buildings, but entire communities and social relationships. There is therefore a risk that transforming this history into a work of art will produce an evocative image that is incapable of conveying the full complexity of the past.
Stokvis-Hauer acknowledges this tension but believes that Nabatele succeeds in speaking simultaneously of a destroyed world and a culture that is still alive. The work does not attempt to reconstruct a lost synagogue nor does it promise an impossible return; rather, it suspends it, renders it mobile, and removes it from the notion of a nostalgic reconstruction. The condition of the diaspora is thus represented not merely as freedom from a specific territory, but as a historical experience of uprooting and transformation. The installation also inevitably engages with the present, marked by wars, migration, and increasingly contested borders. The risk, the artistic director observes, is that the specificity of Jewish history will be absorbed into a generic metaphor of exile. However, it is precisely this openness to interpretation that constitutes one of the work’s strengths. Each visitor can interpret it as a reflection on resilience, a reinterpretation of the figure of the “wandering Jew,” a revelation of the hidden history of synagogues, or a meditation on the layered identities that span places, generations, and cultures.
Following its run in Venice, Nabatele will be presented for the first time in North America, in Montréal, with the aim of launching a tour across the continent. Its creation required entirely new technical solutions developed in collaboration with the teams at Tensys, AreaCubica, and TAO, overcoming numerous logistical and design challenges. The suspended synagogue is thus the result of a collective effort that unites art, memory, technology, and historical research. Its power lies precisely in its instability: it forces us to confront what has been lost and what continues to live on through the people who preserve its memory. Impossible and concrete at the same time, Nabatele transforms a story of destruction into a moving image of continuity, capable of questioning both the past and the present.
Ada Treves