The Peace Blossom Concert Sunday in the Nakashima Conoid Studio celebrated the moving of the Peace Altar to its long-awaited place in Moscow. "It was serendipitous," said Mira Nakashima, who has taken her father's role in completing Peace Altars for each of the five continents.

Although the concert was planned before it was known that the altar would finally be installed the music was a fitting finale for the table's stay in New Hope with flutist Claire Durand-Racamato and pianist Marianne Lauffer performing works by classical composers, one of Durand-Racamato's works and a piece by New Hope composer Matteo Giammario.

Built in 1995 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, the altar waited for final approval from the government and creation of a space. It will be installed in the newly renovated Russian Academy of Art in Moscow when the room set aside for it is completed.

'The long room next to the chapel will house the Peace Table and has two closed large, arched doors into the chapel, which open, but which will probably remain closed most of the time," Mira Nakashima wrote during her recent trip to Moscow with Irene Goldman to see the space. Goldman has led the fund-raising for transporting and installing the Peace Altar in Russia.

She was excited that the doors, both figuratively and physically, represent an opening between theOrthodox Church, in which only men are allowed to enter and other denominations, which will gather around the non-Orthodox altar in the adjacent space.

The Moscow Peace Altar is the second built according to the late George Nakashima's wish. The altar will be at the Hague Conference for Peace in mid-May before moving on to Moscow.

The first is at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York Third, built in 1986, is in Auroville, India.

Donations for shipping and storing the Altar fo Peace can be sent to the Nakashima Studios, 29, Aquetong Road, New Hope 18938,

Mira Nakashima faxed a note Monday morning. "We're moving the Peace Altar out of the museum this afternoon," she wrote, "perhaps the last time it will be seen on this continent."

At 1 p.m., every able-bodied male in the Nakashima compound took his place at the huge table—10 feet long in one direction, about 9 feet across and almost 3 inches thick—to lift it over a wide sill and move it across a gully, up a short slope and onto a pickup truck.

The Minguren Museum wall of windows had been taken out of its frame. "Are you sure it will fit?" someone asked just before the group lifted the heavy piece. "Anyone have a tape?" Assured that the great wooden slab would fit through the opening, the men raised the table top from its pedestal and carried it forward until it rested across the truck's back walls.

They held the piece as it moved uphill to a workshop, Two woodworkers immediately took steel wool to the surface to remove wax that had dripped from candles during a ceremony the day before. They would move the table it to a barn for storage until Wednesday, when a moving van was scheduled to pick the altar up for shipment abroad.

The move to the top of the hill was an inauspicious beginning to the lofty role the altar is about to play.

Built in 1995 in the Nakashima Studios, New Hope, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, the altar will serve as a unifying symbol at The Hague Appeal for Peace May 11-15, the third international peace conference at The Hague, originally planned by American Secretary of State Elihu Root, but interrupted by war 85 years ago.

The first Hague Peace Conference took place May 18, 1899, called by young Czar Nicholas II of Russia who wanted to stop the escalating armament race between Germany and England. The conference ended without progress on disarmament but with rules for warfare that continue today. It adopted declarations against throwing projectiles from aircraft and the use of asphyxiating gases and dum dum bullets and it proposed a second conference to complete the agenda.

The Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907 grew from a groundswell of support in the United States and the Interparliamentary Union of St. Louis. Called by President Theodore Roosevelt, it was formally convened by the Czar, who proposed improvements in arbitration and humanitarian law. Americans suggested discussing arms limitation and the use of force in collection of debts.

The governments of Holland and Russia initiated this year's conference, which is not a treaty-making meeting but a Centennial Commemoration on the theme, 'The Peaceful Settlement of Disputed Prospects for the 21st Century."

"The purpose of The Hague Appeal for Peace 1999," according to Peter Weiss in a background paper, "is more ambitious than the Czar's: It is to raise, in a serious and realistic way, the question of whether, at the end of the bloodiest century in history, humanity can find a way to solve its problems without resorting to arms; whether from the next century onward, war is still necessary or legitimate; and whether, given the nature of the weapons currently in arsenals and on drawing boards, civilization can survive another major war."

The Peace Altar's final destination is Moscow where it will be installed in a room now being prepared at the Academy of Art. It is made from the same monumental black walnut tree as the first Peace Altar, which has been at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York since 1987.

A third altar, has been installed in the City of Peace, Auroville, India, a city that sprung from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, where George Nakashima was once a disciple.

Mira, with her family and the studio staff is helping fulfill the dream of her father, woodworker George Nakashima, to send Peace Altars to each of the five continents.

"It is our belief," Mira said, "That through the gifting of concrete symbols of peace-tables formed by nature aspiring to the Divine, worked by human hands and consecrated to peace&151;universal peace may some dav permeate the entire globe."