Rachel Wischnitzer (1885–1989)

Rachel Bernstein was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Minsk, Russia (now Belarus). When she was a child, they moved to Warsaw, where she attended gymnasium. She learned several languages, including Hebrew, Polish, French, and German. She studied at Heidelberg University and graduated from the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris in 1907, one of the first women to receive a degree in architecture. In 1912, she married Mark Wischnitzer, a sociologist and historian with whom she had a son. The couple moved to Berlin in the 1920s, where they launched the Hebrew and Yiddish journals Rimon and Milgroym. Mrs. Wischnitzer served as a curator at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and as art and architecture editor of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. In 1940, they fled Nazi Germany for the USA. Rachel Wischnitzer obtained a master's degree from New York University in 1944. She wrote books as well as many scholarly articles on ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish art and synagogue architecture, including Synagogue Architecture in the United States (1955), Architecture of the European Synagogue (1964), and From Dura to Rembrandt: Studies in the History of Art (1990). She was a research fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research, and a professor in Stern College for Women's Fine Arts Department, which she helped establish, from 1956 until her retirement in 1968.