Loading article…
Before the Nazi German invasion of Poland in 1939, almost every Polish town had a synagogue or a Jewish house of prayer of some kind. The 1939 statistics recorded the total of 1,415 Jewish communities in the country just before the outbreak of war, each composed of at least 100 members (Gruber, 1995). Every one of them owned at least one synagogue and a Jewish cemetery nearby. Approximately 9.8% of all believers in Poland were Jewish (according to 1931 census).[1]
The list of actives synagogues in Poland cannot possibly include the hundreds of synagogue buildings which still stand today in about 250 cities and towns across the country – seventy years after the Holocaust in Poland which claimed the lives of over 90% of Polish Jewry. Devoid of their original hosts, many synagogue buildings house libraries and smaller museums as in Kraków, Łańcut, Włodawa, Tykocin, Zamość, Radzanów, but many more serve as apartment buildings, shops, gyms and whatever else community needs require. This isn't necessarily bad however, because the synagogues which remain empty are usually worse off due to lack of maintenance.[2]
The Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland (ZGWŻ) with branches in nine metropolitan centres helps the descendants of the Holocaust survivors in the process of recovery and restoration of synagogue buildings once owned by the Jewish Kehilla (קהלה), and nationalized in Communist Poland.[3] The list of active and rededicated synagogues in the country include:
