LOST SYNAGOGUES OF EUROPE

A guide to sacred places that have disappeared.

Among the many scars left by the Holocaust remain the gaping grounds and bulldozed squares where houses of Jewish worship once stood. More than sites of faith, these buildings were community centers, nodes for family and social life. And in their shape and size, the European synagogues were structures unique to a time and place. They represent that blend of enlightenment reason with observant devotion that characterized Jewish life in towns and cities from Livorno to Aachen, from Dresden to Kaliningrad, from Tartu to Vienna. As Ismar Schorsch writes in a foreword to this collection of paintings of lost synagogues, “The synagogue emerged as an utterly new and revolutionary religious institution that privileged intimate verbal prayer over the operation of a vast sacrificial cult.” Synagogues were led by rabbis. They held copies of the Torah. They brought together communities of worship. Jewish tradition requires at least 10 men (a minyan) to form a functioning congregation. By traveling to places that no longer exist, the reader goes on a journey of worship, participating in a recreated minyan of the mind. Should readers use this book to travel to these sites—Strongwater’s colorful and folksy paintings recreate 77 lost synagogues—they will find themselves filling in lacunae in the history of Jewish life. There were once roughly 17,000 synagogues in Europe. Only 3,300 stood after World War II, and only 700 of those remain as synagogues. Strongwater writes, “Because the synagogues painted for this book necessarily represent only those important enough to have been documented in their time, they must do double duty, reminding us of the thousands more that were obliterated without leaving any historical record.” These thousands of buildings, magnificent in their time, cannot be rebuilt. But they can be reinhabited by the creative readers of this haunting travelogue through time.

A guide to missing pieces of European Jewish history, each building lovingly described and painted to bring readers inside.