The husband-and-wife team of Rick and Laura Brown has reconstructed the synagogue of the Polish town of Gwoździec. In an interview, Rick Brown discusses the project itself and the building’s elaborate architecture, ornate wooden carvings, and paintings. In a visual idiom lost and nearly forgotten today, the artwork borrowed symbols and motifs from local Christians but blended them with uniquely Jewish features like the “centralized architectural element” of a high cupola:

Now, we believe Gwoździec was where they came up with this new idea of creating a very elaborate, multi-tiered wooden panel ceiling—we call it a cupola, and it moves upward and inward toward the top. . . . This is where the synagogue was creating its own architectural identity separate from the Christian churches. See, the Christian churches were based on the basilica: a long, straight nave, this processional. You come up the staircase, you go through the doors, you go down the aisle, and you come to the altar at the end. In this synagogue, in Gwoździec, the bimah was in the center; this is where the Torah scrolls were brought during a service, this is where the rabbi would speak, and the congregation would move around the bimah in a kind of circular fashion.

While roughly a third of Saudis are willing to cooperate with the Jewish state in matters of technology and commerce, far fewer are willing to allow Israeli teams to compete within the kingdom—let alone support diplomatic normalization. These are just a few results of a recent, detailed, and professional opinion survey—a rarity in Saudi Arabia—that has much bearing on current negotiations involving Washington, Jerusalem, and Riyadh. David Pollock notes some others:

When asked about possible factors “in considering whether or not Saudi Arabia should establish official relations with Israel,” the Saudi public opts first for an Islamic—rather than a specifically Saudi—agenda: almost half (46 percent) say it would be “important” to obtain “new Israeli guarantees of Muslim rights at al-Aqsa Mosque and al-Haram al-Sharif [i.e., the Temple Mount] in Jerusalem.” Prioritizing this issue is significantly more popular than any other option offered. . . .

This popular focus on religion is in line with responses to other controversial questions in the survey. Exactly the same percentage, for example, feel “strongly” that “our country should cut off all relations with any other country where anybody hurts the Quran.”

By comparison, Palestinian aspirations come in second place in Saudi popular perceptions of a deal with Israel. Thirty-six percent of the Saudi public say it would be “important” to obtain “new steps toward political rights and better economic opportunities for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.” Far behind these drivers in popular attitudes, surprisingly, are hypothetical American contributions to a Saudi-Israel deal—even though these have reportedly been under heavy discussion at the official level in recent months.

Therefore, based on this analysis of these new survey findings, all three governments involved in a possible trilateral U.S.-Saudi-Israel deal would be well advised to pay at least as much attention to its religious dimension as to its political, security, and economic ones.