World War II brought modernity, with all its treacherous enginery, so potently to the forefront of men’s minds that they would never again be able to view the world through the mediating veils of historicist nostalgia. The effects of this sea-change were omnipresent and immediate, in architecture and design as much as in anything else. In pre-war ecclesiastical buildings, the medieval reverie of the Gothic style for churches and the Romanesque for synagogues was feasible right up to the Battle of Britain. But no sooner had the dust settled after the war than a new idiom was urgently sought and ultimately found.

But the solution was hardly self-evident. The most modern architectural idiom ever conceived to that point, the International Style, gave guidance in the matter of residences, offices towers and even, to some degree, museums. But it lapsed into incapacity before the claims of faith, to which, in some senses, its rationalism was fundamentally opposed. A new synthesis was needed and the most visionary builders of that time groped hesitantly for an answer.

One person involved in the search was Philip Johnson, who designed a synagogue for the conservative Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel in Port Chester, N.Y., between 1953 and 1956. As is well known in architectural circles, he did this project without fee, according to the Jewish Museum, “as a public atonement to the Jews for his pro-fascist activities in the 1930s.” Now several of the artifacts that he created for that synagogue, in collaboration with the abstract sculptor Ibram Lassaw, have turned up in a permanent display on the third floor of the Jewish Museum.

These objects all come from the synagogue’s bimah, the platform where the service is led and the Torah ark is set, which was completed between 1956 and 1957. Included among the objects on view are a large screen-like wall sculpture, “Creation,” a menorah, and an eternal light. Johnson also designed the Torah ark, made of English oak and decorated with bronze Hebrew letters fashioned by Lassaw, as well as four bimah chairs, also of English oak.

At Port Chester, as in all examples of postwar religious architecture, the task was to strike a balance between one’s fealty to the modern movement — which in some practitioners attained to the fervor of a faith — and the quest for transcendence.

In most cases, and surely at Port Chester, the commonest solution was, oddly enough, something approaching humor. Before the grimness and mirthless efficiency of the machines that produced Stalingrad and Hiroshima, it was necessary to assert the countervailing power of laughter, childlike and frail, but now infused with a new and paramount moral authority. Though it was Paul Klee who had opened up this option for modern art early in the century, only now, two generations on, were its implications fully understood in the wobbly, irregular lines of men such as Ben Shawn, perhaps the most representative artist of this tendency in postwar art. In terms of sculpture and design, this formal idiom is evident in “Creation,” the fine bimah screen created by Ibram Lassaw. Thirty feet long and 12 feet high, it was to be, in his words, “a symphony structured in space rather than sound … an offering in praise and wonder of the living universe … inspired by the starry fields, the galaxies and galactic clusters of which we are a part … ” Its immaterial bronze squiggles and clusters float across the wall of the Jewish Museum, almost but not quite coalescing into letters. The effect — intentional, of course — is one of almost amateurish hesitancy and humility. All that was sturdy, professional, or grown-up was held in suspicion by Lassaw and others who invoked this artistic vocabulary.

The same effect is evident in the eternal light, a sunlike disk perforated in very rough fashion by a series of slits that suggest the rays of the sun. True, there is a solidity to the ark that Johnson designed, but in its monolithic freedom from ornament, it achieves that sought after effect of humility before god. And this mood is reinforced by Hebrew glyphs, formed from rough-hewn bronze, that Lassaw conceived for its surface. Even the four pale wood chairs that stood upon the bimah are upholstered in pale fabric that stands in inviting contrast to the heaviness or the severity of earlier ecclesiastical seating.

Throughout his long life, Johnson continued to take an interest in the Port Chester synagogue. And he was none too pleased when, two decades ago, a canopy was placed over his entrance. But no sooner had he passed in 2005 than the congregation gutted his interior, which many of the worshippers found cold and uninviting. As Rabbi Jaymee Alpert told The Forward, “This is a synagogue, not a museum.”

Though the synagogue’s architectural components will remain largely untouched, the mood of the interior promises to be very different. In any case, the high modernist monuments that it once contained have found a new home in the Jewish Museum, where, some might argue, they belonged all along.