Samuel D. Gruber

Samuel D. Gruber is an American art and architectural historian and historic preservationist. He has written extensively on the architecture of the synagogue and is an expert and activist in the documentation, protection and preservation of historic Jewish sites and monuments. He was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania and lives in Syracuse, New York.

He is Director of Gruber Heritage Global which includes the Jewish Heritage Research Center (Syracuse, NY), a private consulting firm; and President of the not-for-profit educational International Survey of Jewish Monuments (ISJM). From 1989 until 1995 he served as founding director of the Jewish Heritage Council of the World Monuments Fund and from 1998 through 2008 as Research Director of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad. In these roles Gruber has been, in the words of journalist Bill Gladstone, "in the vanguard of an international movement to restore endangered Jewish heritage sites around the world." Since 2014 Gruber has been consultant to the Lost Shul Mural Project in Burlington, Vermont.

In the decade and a half following the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe (1990-2005), Gruber organized and supervised for the World Monuments Fund and the U.S. Commission more than a dozen countrywide surveys of cultural heritage sites of significance to religious and ethnic minorities. These identified, mostly for the first time, thousands of previously unrecognized and undocumented synagogues, churches, mosques, cemeteries and Holocaust-related sites, almost all of which were visited and by survey teams that described their condition. These projects included full or partial surveys of Jewish sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina,Bulgaria, The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova,Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine; Roma sites in Poland; Old Believers sites in Lithuania; and Protestant Christian and Muslim sites in Bulgaria.

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