Samuel D. Gruber

Samuel D. Gruber is an American art and architectural historian, and 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."

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, 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.

He is author or editor of numerous articles and survey reports about Jewish monuments, and is a frequent public lecturer in the United States and Europe.

In 1990, for the World Monuments Fund, Gruber organized and chaired the first international conference on the preservation of Jewish historic sites. He curated the accompanying exhibition "The Future of Jewish Monuments" at the Joseph Gallery of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Since then he has participated and helped organize many related conferences and seminars including ones in Paris (1999), Prague (2004), and Bratislava (2009).

Since 2001 he has been Lecturer in Judaic Studies at Syracuse University. where he teaches courses on Jewish art and architecture. He has also taught at Temple, Binghamton, Cornell and Colgate universities.

From 2010 through 2012 Gruber was curator of the Plastics Collection at the Special Collection Research Center (SCRC) at the Syracuse University Library.

Gruber was trained as a medievalist and architectural historian and is an expert on medieval urbanism, and especially Italian medieval towns and cities.