Stanisławów Synagogue

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Temple (synagogue) Stanisławów around 1910

The Synagogue Stanisławów , (German Stanislau) in Galicia , today Ivano-Frankivsk in the Ukraine , usually called a temple , was built at the end of the 19th century as a synagogue of Reform Judaism according to plans by the Viennese architect Wilhelm Stiassny in the Moorish style . After the Second World War it was used as a storage room and after the collapse of the Soviet Union it was handed over to the newly founded local Jewish community, which only uses a very small part of the building as a prayer room, while most of it serves as business premises.

history

View of the Stanisławów Synagogue from the Market Square

Jews have lived in Stanisławów since it was founded in the second half of the 17th century. In the 18th century, the Jews, who made up about 45% of the population at the end of the century, were given permission to build a synagogue for the first time. In the early 19th century, the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskala , reached Stanisławów, which was joined by the wealthy and educated Jews who dominated the city's Jewish community. At the end of the century, Zionism also took hold in Stanisławów.

At the end of the 1860s, the first progressive synagogue was opened in Stanisławów, but it did not last. In 1888 the Association for the Israelite Temple was founded, which tried to create the financial conditions for the construction of the reform synagogue and commissioned the engineers Georg and Maksymilian Schloss to plan the construction. After they had submitted the plans, the association decided in February 1894 to contact the Jewish Viennese architect Wilhelm Stiassny for a revision of the plans .

The temple was finally built in the years 1895-1899 according to the plans of Stiassnys. The ceremony of laying the foundation stone by the Orthodox Rabbi Izak Horowitz took place on September 20, 1895, the synagogue was inaugurated on September 4, 1899. Markus Braude was the rabbi. The synagogue was badly damaged in the First World War , but was reopened in 1922.

description

The temple was built on the site of an earlier Greek Catholic church, outside the historic Jewish quarter, near the market square along Berka Street (today: Stratschenych-Straße 7). It is a south-east facing hall building in the Moorish style with four corner towers with domed domes and stars of David at the tips. In the middle of the facade there were three entrances for men, on the sides there were two entrances for women, who reached the three-sided women's gallery via the stairs in the corner towers. Between the corner towers was the vestibule that led to the men's prayer room.

The interior is recorded in a photograph. The apse was emphasized by decorated columns and arches, left and right were two rooms for the rabbi and the cantor , which also had direct entrances from the street. A triumphal arch separated the prayer room from the altar area. The Torah shrine , adorned with a dome reminiscent of the domes of other synagogues in Stiassny, and the bima were on the eastern dais , to which wooden stairs that have been preserved led. The synagogue had a total of 700 seats.

Soviet and German occupation and post-war period

Ivano-Frankivsk Synagogue 2007

In 1939, around 30,000 Jews lived in Stanisławów, and there were more than 50 synagogues in the city when it was occupied by Soviet troops on September 18, 1939. On July 20, 1941, when the Hungarians , allied with the Germans , who occupied Stanisławów on July 2, 1941 after the German invasion of the Soviet Union , surrendered the city to the Germans, more than 40,000 Jews lived in Stanisławów. The Jewish population of the city and the Jewish refugees who were staying in the city were murdered in several massacres by German police units, often with the help of Ukrainian volunteers, or were transported to the Belzec extermination camp and killed there. When the Red Army liberated Stanisławów in July 1944, only around 100 Jews were still alive in and around the city. A Jewish community was not reestablished after the war.

In the 1950s, renovation work was carried out on the synagogue, which was used as a warehouse by the Medical Academy until 1991. In 1956 the four domed domes of the corner towers were removed, the women's gallery was closed and a continuous second floor was built in, to support it with new pillars.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union , a Jewish community had formed again in Ivano-Frankivsk, to which the synagogue could be returned. Since it is far too big for the small community, most of the building is used as business premises. The two entrances on the east side, which formerly led to the two rooms for the rabbi and cantor, serve as entrances for shops, and the main prayer room is used as a sales room; only a small part of the vestibule on the west side is still used as a synagogue.

A memorial was unveiled in front of the synagogue in June 2004, but it does not commemorate the murdered Stanislav Jews, but rather members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) who were shot at this point on November 17, 1943. For Satoko Tanaka, who did her doctorate with a dissertation on the architect of the synagogue, this monument to Ukrainian nationalism in front of the synagogue, surrounded by artificial flower wreaths in the Ukrainian national colors of yellow and blue, symbolizes that the Jews, who once made up half of the city's population , "Were forgotten in the city's history."

Web links

Commons : Stanisławów Synagogue  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Jacob Goldberg et al .: Stanislav . In: Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.): Encyclopaedia Judaica . 2nd Edition. tape 19 . Macmillan Reference USA, Detroit 2007, pp. 162-163 ( Online: Gale Virtual Reference Library ).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Satoko Tanaka: Wilhelm Stiassny (1842–1910). Synagogue building, orientalism and Jewish identity . Dissertation Univ. Vienna. Vienna 2009, p. 72-77 ( Online (PDF; 9.1 MB)).
  3. ↑ Stanislawow I . In: Shmuel Spector, Geoffrey Wigoder (Eds.): The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life. Before and During the Holocaust . tape  3 . New York University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8147-9356-8 ( online ).
  4. ↑ Joshua Shanes: Ivano-Frankivsk . In: Gershon David Hundert (Ed.): The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe . tape 1 . Yale University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-300-11903-9 ( online ).
  5. ↑ Sergey R. Kravtsov: Jewish Identities in Synagogue Architecture of Galicia and Bukovina . In: Ars Judaica . tape 6 . Bar-Ilan University, 2010, ISSN  1565-6721 , p. 98 .
  6. ^ Dieter Pohl: Hans Krüger and the Murder of the Jews in the Stanisławów Region (Galicia) . In: Yad Vashem Studies . Vol XXVI. Yad Vashem, 1998, ISSN  0084-3296 , pp. 239–264 ( English version German in: Gerhard Paul & Klaus-Michael Mallmann (Ed.): Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. WBG, 2004, 2nd rev. 2005 ISBN 3-534-16654-X ; rev . Special edition WBG 2011 & Primus, Darmstadt 2011 ISBN 3-89678-726-8 [PDF]).
  7. ^ Stanisławów . In: Guy Miron and Shlomit Shulhani (eds.): The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos During the Holocaust . tape 2 . Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2009, ISBN 978-965-308-345-5 .

Coordinates: 48 ° 55 ′ 19.3 "  N , 24 ° 42 ′ 43.1"  E