Two Cities, One Story: Rooms and Gardens

The Nationality Rooms at the Cathedral of Learning are a tribute to the many ethnic groups of Pittsburgh. Each group gets a room, decorated in its traditional style. Cleveland has something similar: the Cleveland Cultural Gardens. Each nationality gets a garden, planted with appropriate species.

Both of these institutions run headfirst into one of the biggest questions of Jewish history. Are the Jewish people a “nationality,” a “culture,” a “religion,” and “ethnicity,” or something else entirely? What is the architectural or botanical heritage of a group of people that have lived all over the world?

For the second installment of our popular series Two Cities, One Story, we will partner will Sean Martin of the Jewish American Archives at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland to tell the story of the Israel Heritage Room here in Pittsburgh and the Hebrew Cultural Garden in Cleveland.