‘Unimaginable. The Void After the Great Synagogues’

The ‘Unimaginable. The Void After the Great Synagogues’ exhibition has been opened recently by Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków, Poland and will be available for visitors until August 31, 2026.

Impressive, monumental and prominent in the urban landscape

Walking through the streets of modern Polish cities, we are usually unaware of how visible and prominent Jewish heritage once was in the urban landscape. It is hard for us to imagine that large synagogues could have stood in city centers, along main streets. Some of them were truly monumental and stood out with their exceptional architecture and served as important landmarks. They bore witness to the presence and vitality of Jewish communities that had been rooted here for centuries. The great synagogues, mostly built in the 19th and early 20th centuries, were impressive not only in scale but also in style — from Neo-Gothic to Moorish — reflecting the search for a new, original architectural form for Jewish places of worship. Today, physically absent, they are also missing from our collective memory.

The exhibition Unimaginable. The Void After the Great Synagogues aims to draw attention to both the scale of destruction and the collective amnesia that followed. Annihilated and difficult to visualize from today’s perspective, these beautiful, monumental synagogues were never rebuilt after the Second World War. Their existence is now recalled only by commemorative plaques and monuments, occasionally by preserved prints, photographs, and historical city plans, as well as by digital reconstructions available online. By bringing together examples from 13 cities across Poland, the exhibition serves both as a tribute and as an educational effort to remember a heritage that has been irretrievably lost.

Destruction driven by hatred

The destruction of these extraordinary buildings was driven by hatred and violence — hatred towards everything Jewish, and violence directed both at people and their material culture. The opening of the exhibition on the 86th anniversary of the burning of the Great Synagogue in Oświęcim — an event that took place during the night of 29–30 November 1939 — is an intentional shift in focus: from the date of violence to an act of remembrance.
Presenting this exhibition in Kraków’s Kazimierz district — a historic neighborhood where seven major synagogues from different periods have survived to this day — also invites reflection on Jewish heritage. The fact that these buildings endured the Second World War and the Holocaust is a rare exception to a tragic and painful rule.

Before the Second World War, tens of thousands of synagogues and prayer houses existed across Poland. Built of brick or wood, large and small, from different historical periods and in a variety of architectural styles, they served Jewish communities representing diverse branches of Judaism, from Hasidic to progressive.

The vast majority of this extraordinarily rich and diverse heritage was irretrievably destroyed during the Holocaust. According to the criminal ideology of Nazism, all Jewish communities were to disappear — along with their entire cultural legacy.

The absence of great synagogues

The post-war border changes resulted in parts of former German territories becoming part of Poland, bringing in cities that had been inhabited primarily by Germans and relatively small numbers of German Jews. At the same time, many towns and cities in the east, once home to large and vibrant Jewish communities, were no longer within Poland’s borders.
The absence of great synagogues in cities located within the present-day borders of Poland must be understood within the broader context of the consequences of the Second World War. The loss of this heritage can be examined through three main territorial categories: the so-called “Recovered Territories,” the areas of the former Second Polish Republic annexed directly into the Third Reich, and the lands incorporated into the General Government. In the case of the Recovered Territories — regions that were part of Germany until 1945 — the destruction of synagogues had already begun before the outbreak of the war. Monumental synagogues were burned or severely damaged in November 1938 during the pogrom known as Kristallnacht (“the Night of Broken Glass”).

In the territories annexed by the Third Reich after 1939, the destruction of synagogues mostly took place during the German occupation — through arson, dismantling, or demolition by explosives.

In contrast, within the area of the General Government, the process of synagogue destruction was tied closely to the implementation of the Holocaust. Although some of these buildings survived the early years of the war, they were ultimately demolished between 1941 and 1943, alongside the liquidation of ghettos and the mass annihilation of Jewish communities.