The list of wooden synagogues shows destroyed and extant synagogues, the builders of which adapted an architecture traditional in Central and Eastern Europe to the requirements of Jewish worship. All the large, representative wooden synagogues were destroyed by the end of World War II. Today only a few simple wooden synagogues exist, most of them in Lithuania. Synagogues that no longer exist are recorded as far as they are more precisely known from drawings or photographs.
If years are given in italics, then these are approximate values.
The use of wood as a building material for synagogues was obvious in a wooded region; churches were also initially built as wooden structures. However, a synod in Piotrków in the 16th century demanded that synagogues always be made of wood, not stone, so that stone buildings for Jewish communities were only possible with special permission. Wooden synagogues remained the norm at a time when Christian churches were mostly built as stone.[1]: 17 The political space in which wooden synagogues with typical construction features and painting patterns developed was the Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth (1569–1795), in which the Jewish Council of the Four Lands existed (1580–1764).[2]
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- ^ Cite error: The named reference
:1was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Batsheva Goldman-Ida: Synagogues in Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Modern Period. In: Steven Fine (Hrsg.): Jewish Religious Architecture: From Biblical Israel to Modern Judaism. Brill, Leiden / Boston 2020, S. 184–207, hier S. 191 f.