The city’s Jewish cemetery, which dates back to the eighteenth century, was severely damaged during the 1992-95 war, though it has been partly rebuilt since. The city still houses a tiny Jewish community.
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Sarajevo and Surrounding Areas
When the grand vizier Syavush Pasha came to Sarajevo in 1581, the local representatives of the Sublime Porte asked him to separate the Jews from the rest of the population, for “they lit too many fires and made too much noise”. Syavush Pasha ordered the construction of communitarian housing for the Jews, with a courtyard and synagogue. The Velika Avlija (Old Temple Synagogue) ...
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Iráklion
Within the Venetian outer walls of ancient Candia, the old Jewish quarter is found right beside the seafront. Four synagogues once stood in this district; its perimeter today is delimited by Venizelou, Makariou, and Giamalki streets. The last, still active at the start of the Second World War, was bombed. The Hotel Xenia has been built upon its ruins. Several neighboring Venetianhouses were ...
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Canea
The oldest synagogue in Canea, , lives again after a half century of neglect. Raised from its ruins by Nicholas Stavroulakis, former director and founder of the Jewish Museum of Athens, it was rededicated in October 1999. It should be noted that its reopening was violently protested by the island’s prefect. Etz Hayyim appears to have been the former Venetian oratory of Santa Caterina, ...
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Crete
The Jews have a unique and turbulent history on Crete, one of the most important islands in the Mediterranean. Under the Byzantine Empire, Cretan Jews believed the hour of the final redemption had rung: in 430 C.E., a false messiah, the rabbi Moses, promised to lead them all to Jerusalem; they then threw themselves en masse into the raging sea and drowned. Several centuries later, the hand of ...
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Rhodes
In the fourteenth century, a Jewish community settled behind the ramparts of Rhodes erected by the knights of Saint John after their flight from the Holy Land. These Jews had the strange destiny of finding common ground with the Crusaders in their war against the Ottomans, only to be forced by Grand Master Pierre d’Aubusson to convert to Christianity or flee. The waves of expulsion from ...
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Delos
Visiting the site in Delos is quite easy throughout the summer, the island being accessible by boat from nearby Mykonos. If one place attests to the presence of a Jewish community in Ancient Greece, it is certainly that of Delos, an arid island of the Cyclades. The existence of Jews here is referred to in the Book of Maccabees, while Flavius Josephus mentions them as well. Too tiny to flex ...
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Corfu
In the late 12th century, Jewish traveler Benjamin de Tudela encountered a lone Jew on Corfu. Three centuries later, however, Jews had become so numerous here that the Venetians, then in control of this much-coveted, strategically important Adriatic island, had them confined to ghettos. A local Christian legend, which, strangely spoke of Judas as a native of Corfu, made Jewish life here even ...
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Ioánnina
Ioánnina, one of the most ancient Jewish communities in Europe, still bears the deep imprint of the long Ottoman presence in Greece. At the heart of the mountainous Epirus region, Ioánnina (280 miles from Athens near the Albanian border, the two cities connected by a difficult road) still harbors a small Jewish community. Hellenized Romaniote Jews were present for over 2300 years, Ioannina ...
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Thessaloníki
When David Ben Gurion moved to Thessaloníki to learn Turkish in 1910, he was surprised to discover a city like none found in “Eretz Israel”: The Shabbat marked the day of rest here, and even the dockworkers were Jewish. He was advised not to admit he was Ashkenazic (all the procurers were). Jewish and Sephardic, Thessaloníki had been called “Mother of ...
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Athens
3,2,1… go! Set off on a marathon walk through time, 2500 years to be precise, to discover the monuments of Athens and its Jewish cultural heritage. Starting with the Panathenaic Stadium. An ancient stadium dating back to 330 BC, it was renovated in 1896 to host the first Olympic Games of the modern era, with 28,400 spectators cheering the athletes. Then, cross over. Either to the right, ...
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Istanbul and Surrounding Areas
Sumptuous and decadent, immense and frenetic, Istanbul is “the world in one city”, as it is often described by Western travelers overwhelmed by the city’s splendor. The skyline of Istanbul is punctuated by hundreds of minarets, majestic onion domes, and bell towers. “An aged hand covered with rings held out toward Europe”, according to Jean Cocteau, the great ...
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Burgas
The synagogue here has been transformed into an art gallery. Built at the turn of the century following plans of the Italian architect Ricardo Toscani, during the 1960s it was completely remade into an exhibition space for some 2500 works by contemporary Bulgarian painters, as well as for a collection of old icons. A terrorist attack was carried out against Israeli tourists in Burgas in 2012.
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Bulgarian Plains
In the Plains region, Jewish life is maintained by the people of Plovdiv, which boasts a beautiful, colourful synagogue for its few hundred worshippers. Efforts are being made to revive synagogues in Ruse, the birthplace of Elias Canetti, and Burgas, which has been transformed into an art gallery. Even more surprisingly, recent archaeological excavations have uncovered a synagogue dating back ...
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Timisoara
The first Jews probably settled in Timisoara in the 17th century. Gravestones were found in the city dating from that era. At the end of the conflict between the Austrians and the Turks, a Jewish Community life quickly developed. Both Sephardic and Ashkenazic. Places of worship were created but also cultural establishments as well as schools. Facing regular waves of anti-Semitism, the results ...
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Bucharest
Jewish Bucharest has almost completely disappeared. Of a population estimated at 158,000 souls in 1948, there remain only 2,000 people today. Living across the four corners of the capital, they are doubtlessly too old or in too precarious an economic situation to contemplate emigration. The old Jewish quarter The old Jewish quarter was located near the Unirei (Union) Square on the other side ...
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Wlodawa
Jews began settling in Wlodawa in the seventeenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, they numbered 3,670 (66% of the population), then 4,200 (67%) in 1921, and 5,650 (75%) in 1939. The Germans created a ghetto to which they deported 800 Jews from Kraków and 1,000 from Vienna, before exterminating them all in the camp near Sobibór, a mile or two from here in the forest, beside the ...
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Ukrainian Border
In this region, the town of Wlodawa boasts a particularly interesting Baroque synagogue, built at the end of the 18th century. Nearby is the Sobibor camp, where many victims of the Holocaust were massacred.
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Jozefów
The city of Jozefów possesses a beautiful late-seventeenth century . It can be seen almost immediately upon arriving in the village, on the right and set back a bit in relation to the city center and the intersection of Górnicza and Krótka streets. It was rebuilt in the 1990s and converted into a public library with one distinctive feature: upstairs, a doctors office and hotel are located in ...
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Szczebrzeszyn
Szczebrzeszyn is today a small, tranquil city, with a Catholic church and city hall downtown. A jewish community sprang up in Szczebrzeszyn in the sixteenth century, while the was built here in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, the community experienced important growth, jumping from 1,083 members (31% of the population) in 1827 to 2450 (44%) in 1897; it also became a center ...
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Zamosc
Zamosc is a magnificent example from the Polish Renaissance era. Built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Italian architects in the service of Kings Sigismund and Casimir, the city offers a distinctive architectural unity, with its wide-stepped city hall, central square lined with beautiful Renaissance and Baroque mansions, and its crisscrossing of old, narrow streets arranged ...
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Kazimierz Dolny
If one stop along the road from Lublin to Warsaw is a must, it is in the city of Kazimierz Dolny on the Vistula, first because it is a tourist city, with old houses, a magnificent rynek lined with Renaissance or Baroque facades, a large church, and castle, but also because it has been marked by an important Jewish presence, of which there remain a few remarkable traces, most notably the ...
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Lublin
An important city in eastern Poland, Lublin has preserved a very picturesque old quarter that offers a glimpse of what life was like here in the seventeenth century, with a city hall in the middle of the rynek, a Dominican church, fortifications, and various city gates. Lublin also features a castle surrounded by a park plucked straight out of a tale from The Thousand and One Nights. The ...
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Lublin Plateau
The Lublin Plateau bears witness to ancient traces of Jewish life, as evidenced by the presence of 17th-century synagogues in Jozefow, Zamosc and Szczebrzeszyn and an 18th-century one in Kazimierz Dolny. Of course, it is in Lublin that you will find the most places to visit in reference to the region’s Jewish cultural heritage. Its synagogue, its mikveh, its little streets and its long ...
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Lancut
Lancut is a small, pleasant city known for its Renaissance castle once belonging to the Lubomirskis. The town also possesses a Baroque synagogue, one of the most beautiful in Poland. Built in 1761, destroyed during the war, and rebuilt during the 1960s, it has long served as a regional museum. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was completely restored once more, including the magnificent ...
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Rymanów
Jews settled in Rymanów so long ago that there exists no document mentioning their arrival. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the inhabitants of the city lived mainly from the cultivation of the vines and the wine trade, an activity in which the Jewish community held a preponderant place. In 1765, a thousand Jews lived in Rymanów, or 43% of the population. In the eighteenth century, ...
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Lesko
The small city of Lesko possesses one of the most beautiful fortified synagogues in the region, built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a turret that gives it the look of a little castle. Destroyed during the war, it was rebuilt in 1980; the interior mannerist decor had been redone, as had the eighteenth-century iron gate and aron kodesh. The Lesko cemetery is almost across the ...
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Rzeszów
Jews began to settle in Rzeszów in the fifteenth century and, in the seventeenth century, built two synagogues, both of which remain, almost side by side. They are fairly easy to find, located right in the city center. , dating from the first years of the seventeenth century, today houses the city archives. It is rather small, but well restored on the outside. A Star of David can still ...
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Tarnów
In Tarnów, half of the population was Jewish: between 20,000 and 25,000 people worked principally in the clothing and hat industries (sixty or so businesses), arts and crafts, and trade. Some were rich merchants, lawyers, and doctors who owned beautiful houses still dominating Walowa Street. The others, poorer, were concentrated mostly in the populated districts around Zydowska, Warynskiego, ...
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Kraków
In 1335, King Casimir the Great founded an independent city near Kraków, Kazimierz, in which he permitted Jews to settle around Sukiernikow (Clothier) Street (now called Jozefa Street), next to the Christian quarter. They built the Stara Synagogue, a mikvah, hotel, and wedding chapel on the main street called Szeroka (Wide) Street. In the sixteenth century, a large number of Jews arrived here ...
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