Samuel Gruber was a Rome Prize Fellow in art history at the Academy in 1987, working on his dissertation about medieval Todi. Two years later he was the first director of the Jewish Heritage Program of the World Monuments Fund, traveling across rapidly changing Eastern Europe on a still-in-progress journey to document, protect, and preserve the Jewish art and architectural legacy worldwide. In this talk Gruber will describe how an entirely new field of study and preservation work has developed since he began this work thirty-five years ago.

Gruber has been a leader in the documentation, protection, and preservation of historic Jewish sites worldwide for thirty-five years. He was the founding director of the Jewish Heritage Program of World Monuments Fund (1988–1995) and research director of the US Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad (1998–2008). Today Gruber is a cultural-heritage consultant and president of the not-for-profit International Survey of Jewish Monuments. He is author of American Synagogues: A Century of Architecture and Jewish Community (2003), Synagogues (1999), and scores of published reports and articles.