Synagogues

1748 in Pińczów there were 3 synagogues. Among them there was the oldest wooden Synagogue. According to the legend the King of Poland has offered the local authorities, a place to build the synagogues that was considered as an act of great respect. Until the WW II were preserved only two synagogues. Unfortunately during war, they have been destroyed and one of them pulled down.

The synagogue that you can see behind me was devastated and neglected. Fortunately the synagogues has been restored and how we can visit it. The synagogue is not only the building that we see today. In the past here has also been a rabbi’s one storeyed and small little gravediggers house.
The last rabbi in Pińczów was Rapaport Szapsia.

      The Old Synagogue is a cuboid. Its walls are supported by stone buttresses, and high walls built up over the ceiling's level form an austere attic deprived of any decorative elements. The attic shelters a concave wooden roof with copper roofing, and water gathering there is removed outside by metal spouts.

      The shul consists of several rooms. There is the main room, called male room, with an adjoining vestibule which had a kahal room sectioned off; over them, in the first floor, with a separate entry, there is the women's gallery (empora). This synagogue is in Polish synagogue architecture the oldest example of a temple of a so-called lengthwise system, in which all rooms were built at the same time and form a compact building with a common roof. The synagogue was continuously surrounded by annexes which held among others religious school rooms and stairs to the upper floor; until today survived only a newer ground-floor vestibule with the main entrance.

      The male room takes over half the space in the building, but at the same time it is considerably lower set in comparison to the vestibules and the ground level, because the synagogue was once situated in a slight drop in ground level. Since 2005, the room is decorated by two stained-glass windows by Jacek Nowak, brought from Heidelberg and presenting hundreds of faces.

      The vestibule was once the synagogue's main transport node, with entrances to the other rooms and the exit. Its ceiling and walls are covered by beautiful polichromy with plant tendrils, flower vases, bowls of fruit, birds, animals and fantastic creatures. There are also painted prayer texts as well as foundation inscriptions with the dates of 1695-96 and 1741-42

      The synagogue is surrounded by a wall the whole surface of which is lined with fragments of headstones of historical value from the town's destroyed Jewish cemeteries. It was meant to be a monument to commemorate the once presence in Pińczów of the town's former, tragically gone inhabitants.

      The synagogue is visited by about seven thousand people yearly, both from Poland and from abroad: there come Pińczów Jews and their descendants looking for traces of the past, there come individual tourists, and there is also the most numerous of all groups – young people from Israel, the USA, Scotland and other countries. After many years, there have come good times for the synagogue and it's again dawning in Pińczów for it.