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Maisel Synagogue

The Maisel Synagogue (Maiselova synagogue in Czech) was funded by Mordechai Maisel. The impressive synagogue was built by Judah Tzoref de Herz and Josef Wahl in 1592. The architects designed the Renaissance style structure with three naves, which was unusual for its time. It served as both a place of prayer and a venue for Jewish social gatherings. It had to be rebuilt numerous times after a fire in the ghetto burnt the original structure down in 1689. The latest reconstruction, by Prof. A Grotte in 1893, uses a Neo-Gothic style, which blends it with the neighborhood’s new appearance. Jews in the Bohemian Lands, 10th-18th Century is a permanent exhibition in this synagogue-turned-museum, The exhibit has some new items on display and audio-visual and interactive elements were recently added.

Image Attribution: Official Tourism Website of Prague

Memorial de la Shoah

Mémorial de la Shoah is the Holocaust museum in Paris, France. The memorial is in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, in the Marais district, which had a large Jewish population at the beginning of World War II. The memorial was opened, by President Jacques Chirac, on 27 January 2005. This day was chosen to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp. The memorial underwent a major renovation in 2005, creating exhibition spaces, a multimedia center, and a reading room.

Wall of Names
Several walls that make a passageway to the building list the names of the approximately 76,000 French Jews who were deported and murdered by the Nazis. They are listed alphabetically by year of deportation.

The Crypt
The crypt predates the Mémorial de la Shoah; in 1957, the ashes of victims from the different death camps and the Warsaw Ghetto were buried in dirt from Israel. A door from the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp in France faces the tomb.

The “Jewish Files”
The Jewish files are located in a small room near the crypt. They were created by the Vichy government to identify Jewish citizens, and were later used by the Nazis to locate Jews for deportation.

Exhibit Rooms
The memorial’s permanent exhibit documents the history of French Jews during the Holocaust. The materials on exhibit include photographs, text, and video and audio recordings.

The memorial also includes an auditorium, bookstore, multimedia learning center, documentation center, and the Room of Names (research room).

The Wall of the Righteous
Since 1963, the Museum Memorial of Yad Vashem (Jerusalem) has awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations” to non-Jewish people who helped save Jews during the war. As of 2014, this wall lists 3,300 people, either French or acting in France, who have been awarded this title. The wall runs alongside of the memorial.

Image attribution:
BrnGrby, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Grand Synagogue de Paris

The Grand Synagogue of Paris, generally known as Synagogue de la Victoire or Grande Synagogue de la Victoire, is situated at 44, Rue de la Victoire, in the 9th arrondissement. It also serves as the official seat of the chief rabbi of Paris.

The architect was Alfred-Philibert Aldrophe (1834–1895) who also built the Versailles Synagogue and that of Enghien-les-Bains. Building commenced in 1867 and the Synagogue was inaugurated in 1874, and opened to the general public in 1875, built in the classical style, but embellished with Byzantine frills. The inscription in Hebrew at the entrance is a verse from Genesis 28,17 : “This is none other than the House of God, the very gateway to Heaven”, the same as is found on the entrance to the synagogue of Reims and that of Bar-le-Duc.

The interior has a number of religious inscriptions above the doors. In the choir pulpit is written in French the names of the prophets. Above the Torah Ark is engraved with the words “ה ‘ניסי” (“The Lord-is-my-banner” Ex 17:15) It also includes a series of 12 stained glass windows symbolising the Tribes of Israel.

Every year, the Sunday before Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), there takes place a ceremony in remembrance of the Martyrs of the Deportation, which is televised on France 2.

Image attribution:
Luiza Fediuc, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Olevy, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Jewish Museum of Art and History

The Museum of Jewish Art and History is the largest French museum of Jewish art and history. It is located in the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan in the Marais district in Paris.

The museum conveys the rich history and culture of Jews in Europe and North Africa from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Its fine collection of religious objects, archives, manuscripts, and works of art promotes the contributions of Jews to France and to the world, especially in the arts. The museum’s collections include works of art from Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani.

The museum has a bookshop selling books on Jewish art and history and Judaica, a media library with an online catalogue accessible to the public, and an auditorium which offers conferences, lectures, concerts, performances, and seminars. It also provides guided weekly visits in English during the tourist season (April to July) for individuals as well as students and teachers, and workshops for children, families, and adults.

The Pletzl – Jewish Quarter of Paris

The Pletzl (“little place” in Yiddish) is the Jewish quarter in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, France. The Place Saint-Paul and the surrounding area were unofficially named the Pletzl when the neighborhood became predominantly Jewish after an influx of immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The area hosts a diverse Jewish community, assembling traditional Jewish families as well as many more who arrived through immigration from Eastern Europe and North Africa through the past centuries. The area is now characterised by its synagogues, butchers, delicatessens, and falafel vendors, which provide a social and cultural fabric for its inhabitants.

The darkest days for the Pletzl came during World War II, when Vichy France’s collaboration with the Nazis resulted in raids that saw many residents abducted and sent off to concentration camps. Today, the community is an extremely religious Orthodox one, and most citizens belong to one of the three local synagogues: one located at 17 Rue des Rosiers, another at 25 Rue des Rosiers, and the last one at 10 Rue Pavée; the latter is an art nouveau temple designed by Hector Guimard, famous for his work on the Paris Métro.

Agoudas Hakehilos Synagogue

The Agoudas Hakehilos Synagogue, at 10 rue Pavée, in the 4th arrondissement of Paris (Le Marais quarter), commonly referred to at the Pavée synagogue or Guimard synagogue, was designed by Art Nouveau architect Hector Guimard and erected between 1913 and 1914.

The synagogue was commissioned by the Agoudas Hakehilos, society composed of Orthodox Jews of primarily Russian origin, headed by Joseph Landau. Its erection is a testament to the massive wave of immigration from Eastern Europe that took place at the turn of the 20th century. Funded by this wealthy Polish-Russian group it did not cost the Parisian community a centime. They intended to provide a spacious and modernized place for Jews accustomed to the intimate and often squalid shtiblakh.

The construction of the Synagogue started in 1913 and was completed the following year, with the official inauguration taking place on 7 June 1914; nevertheless the Synagogue had been already active for services since October 1913. The opening ceremony was not attended by any of the representants of the Central Consistory, instead famous polish Hazzan Gershon Sirota was present at the event.

During the year in 1934 a gas explosion destroyed the main hall which was rebuilt right after. On the evening of Yom Kippur in 1941, the building was dynamited along with six other Parisian synagogues by collaborators of the nazi occupants; however the bomb did not go off and the building was preserved. On the night between 2 and 3 October of the same year, the synagogue was damaged following an attack organised by far-right association Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire. It was partially restored afterwards, but the main entrance was altered from its original appearance.

The building was registered as a monument historique by the French authorities on July 4, 1989. The synagogue is fully functional today with the Rabbi being Rav Moredekhai Rottenberg, the son of the late Rav Haim Yaakov Rottenberg, known as the Rouv. The synagogue is now open to the public.

The Dohany Street Synagogue

The synagogue on the Dohany street of Pest is not only the most impressive one in the country, but it’s the largest synagogue of Europe, the second largest one in the world. (The largest Jewish house of worship in the world is the Temple Emanu-El in New York). The tours in the Jewish district of Budapest all have their departure point at the Dohany synagogue. This recently restored, magnificent, twin-towered building celebrated 150 years of existence in 2009. Let it take your breath away with its beautiful interior, see why it is among the top ten sights of Budapest.

The second largest synagogue of the world located in downtown Budapest had to be constructed on an asymmetric lot in order to place the Ark looking East. In a way it is hidden from our eyes if we arrive to the 7th district from Muzeum korut (where the National Museum is), however the talent of its designers is shown by the impressiveness of the building even if facing a small square and not the boulevard. Frigyes Feszl and Ludwig Fďż˝rster created their masterpiece in the middle of a metropolis using the Oriental-Byzantine (Moorish) style influenced by Moslem architecture.

The consecration of the synagogue was a major event on September 6, 1859. It can hold 3000 seated and approximately 2000 standing people. Major events took and take place here, like the celebrations part of the 1000th anniversary of the Hungarian Conquest in May 1896, memorial services for important Hungarian personalities in the 19th century, liturgical, organ or Klezmer concerts nowadays. The Dohany Synagogue remained the most important religious centre of the Neolog Jews in Hungary to this day.

Kazinczy Street Synagogue

Kazinczy Street Synagogue is an Art Nouveau orthodox synagogue built between 1912 and 1913 Budapest VII. district, 29-31 Kazinczy Street number. It is one of the most characteristic works of Hungarian synagogue architecture before the First World War. The gigantic building that dominates the narrow Kazinczy Street was completed between 1912 and 1913, based on the plans of Sándor Löffler and Béla Löffler. The interior is decorated with decorative stonework that supports glass windows painted by Miksa Róth. The Torah reading platform stands in the middle of the space.

At the end of the 19th century, the Jewish community of Pest broke into three branches – Neolog, status quo ante and Orthodox. The Kazinczy Street Synagogue was built for the latter – the most tradition-bound, strict Jewish community. The community building complex includes the synagogue, a house of worship, headquarters, a kindergarten, a Talmud school, a butcher and bath (mikveh). The latter was renovated in 2004, under the guidance of a Hasidic plumber from New York, who worked here from Sundays to Thursdays, then got on a plane and went home to spend the Sabbath with his family. The water of the well that supplies the bath’s was purified with 1000 liters of red wine. The smaller, modern house of worship next to the synagogue was built by the plans of religious community engineer Sándor Bokor.

Image attribution:
Emmanuel Dyan, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives

The Hungarian Jewish Museum is located in the heart of Budapest, in the Historical Jewish quarter, within the building complex of the Dohany Street Synagogue that was built in 1859. The idea of an independent Jewish Museum arose in 1909, when our Museum was founded. The first home of the collection made up of approximately 1,500 artefacts was an apartment downtown Budapest. The Jewish Museum found its final home in 1932 at the building designed by Laszlo Vago and Ferenc Farago, which was constructed next to the Dohany street synagogue in a matching architectural style.

In 1942 two employees of the Hungarian National Museum hid the valuable artefacts of the Jewish Museum in the cellar. Thanks to their bravery, the entire rich collection exists today. The permanent exhibition was rearranged in 2017, displaying the Jewish festivals and lifecycle. Our Milev-App The Milev-app can be downloaded from Google Play and the App Store.

Holocaust Memorial Center

The Holocaust Memorial Center is a national institution established by the Government in 1999. In 2002, it decided to construct the building of the Center in Páva Street, outside of the traditional Jewish quarter, further emphasizing its national character. The Holocaust Memorial Center is a museum and an exhibition hall at the same time, offering daily to its visitors an attractive permanent, and frequently changing periodic exhibitions. The equipment and the space in the modern building are shaped to allow displaying classical retrospectives, as well as innovative, interactive exhibitions.

The permanent presentation is placed in the basement of the Memorial Center, while the periodic exhibitions use the space of the refurbished synagogue, particularly its gallery, and the inner court of the Center. The accuracy and authenticity of the exhibitions is monitored by outstanding Hungarian and foreign historians, artists and experts. The Holocaust Memorial Center is one of the few institutions in the world, established by the state that focuses entirely on Holocaust research and education.

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