Inside a headset, a memorial returns
A CWRU team uses XR to bring Temple-Tifereth Israel’s World War II memorial back to its first home.
Atia Anwerbasha (CWR ’26) had spent nearly four years at Case Western Reserve University before she learned that one of its most familiar performance spaces had once been a sanctuary.
Before concerts, lectures and university events filled the room now called Koch Recital Hall, it had been a chapel within Temple-Tifereth Israel. And before the congregation’s World War II memorial was moved to Beachwood in 2015, its ornate stained-glass windows looked out from that same room.
Anwerbasha learned that history this spring in a religious studies course taught by Alanna Cooper, PhD, while Anwerbasha and her classmates photographed the memorial’s windows from every angle so a computer could rebuild them in three dimensions.
“History can erode over time if it’s not thoughtfully preserved,” said Anwerbasha, who studied cognitive science and sociology. “You can be in a place every day and still not understand the history and context that shaped it.”
The memorial was dedicated in University Circle on Hanukkah in 1947, before an audience of more than a thousand. Temple-Tifereth Israel commissioned it to honor 765 members of the congregation who served in World War II—and the 22 who were killed.
It was built as an ensemble: a 35-pound book of service records resting on a carved bald eagle, three Hebrew-inscribed “warrior windows” set in a hand-built wooden frame and an American flag in the anteroom. Just beyond, in the sanctuary itself, ran a wall of stained glass—the only stained glass the renowned illustrator Arthur Szyk would ever design.
Then the building’s life changed.
In 2015, the congregation gifted its University Circle building to CWRU and moved to Beachwood. The memorial went with it. The room left behind is now the Koch Recital Hall—a performance space with a stage, rows of seats and clear glass where the Szyk windows once were.
Cooper, the Abba Hillel Silver Chair of Jewish Studies at the College of Arts and Sciences and an associate professor of religious studies, is bringing the memorial back to the room through an extended reality (XR) installation funded by an Experimental Humanities grant she received in December. The grants are part of the Expanding Horizons Initiative, supported by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation, and fund faculty-student collaborations that use digital tools to explore humanistic questions in new ways.
Put on a headset and the room rearranges itself: a wall closes off the modern stage, the ark reappears, and the Szyk windows fill the empty frames. Follow the sound of trumpets into the anteroom, and the eagle, the flag and the book return.
“The beauty of the project is that it allows visitors to occupy the space the way it is today in the 21st century, but also to understand that architectural spaces have histories that are sometimes much longer than our human lives,” Cooper said. “These spaces hold those stories inside of them.”
A soldier in art
The project grew out of Cooper’s scholarship. Her forthcoming book—Preserving and Disposing of the Sacred from Penn State University Press—follows American Jewish congregations as they downsize, merge, and dissolve, asking what becomes of the stained glass, the arks and the memorial plaques they leave behind.
The Tifereth Israel memorial brought several strands of Cooper’s work together. The rabbi who commissioned it, Abba Hillel Silver, gave his name to the chair Cooper now holds. The artist, Szyk, was a Polish Jewish immigrant who called himself a “soldier in art,” whose anti-fascist illustrations appeared on the covers of Collier’s and Time. He had never worked in stained glass before and would never again.
This spring, Cooper taught a course built around creating a prototype of the XR project. Religious studies students worked alongside computer science graduate students. They scripted a narrative, visited the congregation’s new sanctuary in Beachwood to photograph the original objects, and—with help from staff at CWRU’s Interactive Commons and the Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship at Kelvin Smith Library—stitched hundreds of images into three-dimensional digital assets through a process called photogrammetry.
All in one semester.
Kevin Arndt (CWR ’26) helped construct the 3D models and place them inside the experience.
“This technology rebuilds that space around you,” said Arndt, who just graduated with degrees in finance and biochemistry and will enter a PhD program in biochemistry this fall. “It makes the experience of learning about the 22 soldiers who died in World War II that much deeper and more meaningful.”
A wallet, a niece, a Purple Heart
Of those 22 soldiers, the class came to know Alvin Louis Koblitz best. A Cleveland Heights native and U.S. Army Air Forces bombardier, he was reported missing in action over the North Sea in April 1945. He was 21. Nearly a year later, according to family materials Cooper reviewed, a fisherman recovered his wallet. Cooper tracked down Koblitz’s niece, who had become the keeper of family memories, and she opened her archives—photographs, letters, his Purple Heart.
Those materials became part of the script, alongside research from across the class. Malcolm Schmitz, a transfer student through the Cleveland Humanities Collaborative whose background includes video game writing, helped turn those pieces into a guided experience—one that balanced archive, narration, image and space.
“It was a little bit like conducting an orchestra,” he said.
For Schmitz, the goal was not to show off the technology, but to use it in service of the people behind the memorial.
“People think technology is somehow separate from humanity, like it’s this cold alien thing,” he said. “But we wanted people to be at the center—and think about the human experience we were creating.”
For one student, that human center carried a more personal charge. The memorial’s names were not abstractions to Teray Perry—a Marine veteran and a junior majoring in political science—but reflections of service and loss he understood personally.
“To be part of an effort that focuses on the sacrifices of those veterans is a huge honor,” Perry said. “I hope we created an experience that invites people to use their imaginations, to feel something—to think about how their own family is a part of history.”
The long life of a building
The installation is still a prototype. Cooper’s next phase will include a public, searchable database of all 765 service records and a virtual rededication of the memorial in December 2027—the 80th anniversary of its original dedication.
In the headset, the room does not go back to 1947. But it does hold two moments at once: what the space is now, and what it once asked people to remember.
That question runs through Cooper’s scholarship: what changes, what remains and what each generation chooses to do with what has been left to it.
“We inherit many things,” said Cooper. “And we are stewards for the things that will be carried forward.”
