JEM Beaugrenelle Synagogue

11 rue Gaston de Caillavet, 75015 Paris

Luxembourg

The first documents attesting to the presence of Jews in Luxembourg date from 1276, when an act mentions the Jewish religion of Henri de Luxembourg. The Jews have lived in the Pétrusse valley at the time. Persecutions, leading in some cases to death, followed charges of poisoning wells during the plague epidemic of 1348. The Jews who survived these persecutions fled the country, from which ...

Rashi Memorial

In front of the Théâtre de Champagne Boulevard Gambetta, 10000 Troyes

Troyes

During the Middle Ages, the Aube Region in France hosts many Jewish communities including Villenauxe-la-Grande, Saint-Mards-en-Othe, Plancy-l’Abbaye, Ervy-le-Chätel, Lhuître, Mussy-sur-Seine, Ramerupt, Dampierre , Brienne-le-Chäteau, Bar-sur-Aube and especially Troyes. The Jewish presence in the city of Troyes probably dates from the XIth century, a fact which can be verified from ...

Daugavpils Synagogue and Jewish Museum

Cietoksna iela 38, Daugavpils Tel : +371 29548760

Communauté juive libérale de Genève – GIL

43, Route de Chêne, 1208 Genève + 41 22 732 32 45 www.gil.ch

Cuneo

Italy > Piedmont

Located 90 km south of Turin and 45 km from the French border, the city of Cuneo was once home to one of the most important Jewish communities in Piedmont. Today, made up of about fifteen people, the community stands out for its attachment to its synagogue. Located in the heart of what was once the ghetto of the city, the synagogue was built in the seventeenth century and largely modified in ...

Hochfelden

France > Alsace

Built in 1841 and registered as a historical monument in 1996, Hochfelden’s synagogue is a classical example of Alsatian’s synagogues architecture. You can see the synagogue, mikveh, Jewish school and rabbi’s house.

Cornelis Houtmanstraat Synagogue

Cornelis Houtmanstraat 11, 2593 RD La Haye +31 (0) 70 350 7621

Oslo

Jews established in Norway around 1851 when a law prohibiting their entry was revoked. The Jewish Community became organized at the end of the century. In 1920, two synagogues were opened. In 1930, the Community only numbered 852 persons. During the Holocaust, half of the Jews escaped, mostly to Sweden. The rest were deported and murdered. Oslo’s Jewish community centers around the , ...

Uman

Ukraine > From Kiev to the Black Sea

The city of Uman is most famous for the Sophievka, a park built by Count Potocki in the grand style typical of eighteenth-century landscape architecture. It is also where Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (Brasov), a great-grandson of Baal Shem Tov and continuer of his doctrine, settled and later died in 1810. Only one grave remains from the old Jewish cemetery: that of Rabbi Nahman, a holy shrine ...

Riga

Around 9000 Jews live in Riga. Riga is also home to to the only Jewish hospital in the former Soviet Union. The Latvian Society for Jewish Culture is the principal organization of the Jewish community. Few of Riga’s religious edifices remain. , which opened in 1871 and was located at 25 Gogol Street, burned down in 1941. Several hundred people trapped inside perished in the blaze. Some ...

Panevezys

Panevezys is Lithuanian for Ponevezh, famous for its yeshiva that its prewar leader, Rav Yosef Kahaneman, reestablished following the war in Bnei Brak, the Orthodox quarter of Tel Aviv. The Ponevezh yeshiva in Israel is today the principal center for the Mitnagdim sect and has given birth to the Israeli political party Degel Hatorah. Rav Eliezer Schach, Degel Hatorah’s leader was, until ...

Belgrade

Serbia and Montenegro (ex-Yugoslavia)

After the conquest of Belgrade by the Turks in 1521, Sephardic Jews quickly supplanted in number the Ashkenazic community that had arrived before them, from Hungary in particular. Loyal Turkish subjects, Belgrade’s Jews enjoyed an initial phase of relative prosperity, transforming the city into one of the premier Sephardic centers in the Balkans. The Belgrade yeshiva was known ...

Southern Transylvania

The spirit of Austro-Hungarian Cacania still breathes within the medieval cities that lie on the Transylvanian side of the Carpathians, populated until recently by Swabians and Saxons. Lynxes and bears still haunt the high valleys surrounding Timisoara, the capital of Banat, and the neighboring towns of Sibiu, Sihisoara, Brasov, and Rasnov, characterized by their stocky, Baroque houses of ...

Boskovice

Czech Republic > Moravia

Boskovice is located nineteen miles north of Brno. This large center of Jewish culture and study of the Torah was for many years the headquarters of the chief Rabbinate of Moravia. The fifteenth-century Jewish quarter extends from the present-day Bilkova and Plackova Streets, near the large square. The original plan, with the ghetto gate always visible and the tiny streets lined with ...

Szeged

Half a day will suffice to see the synagogue in Szeged, one of the most interesting ones in Hungary (1903). With its Baroque dome, Roman columns, and Byzantine-inspired bellows, the monumental building is a hymn to eclecticism. At the entrance, two plaques honor rabbis Lipot, a reform pioneer who was the first to deliver his sermons in Hungarian, and Immanuel Loew, son of the former whose ...

Ljubljana

Slovenia > Central and Northeast Slovenia

The only remaining traces of a prior Jewish presence in Ljubljana are the names of two narrow streets in the city center, Street of the Jews (Zidovska ulica) and Passage of the Jews (Zidovska steza), the place of the medieval ghetto until the 1515 expulsion. The remains of a neighborhood of about thirty houses have apparently been found beneath the Baroque buildings here, constructed in the ...

Ancona

Italy > The Marches

The Jews first aarrived in Ancona around 1000 C.E. In the fourteenth century, the city hosted a significant Jewish community, whose activities were organized around the port and commerce with the Orient. In 1541, Pope Paul III encouraged Jews expelled from Naples and, in 1547, even the Marranos from Portugal to settle in Ancona, granting them protection from the Inquisition. A hundred or so ...

Padua

In the fourteenth century, Padua was one of the great centers of medieval Judaism, with a celebrated rabbinical academy where students from all over Europe came to study. These students were also attracted to Padua by its very old medical school, the only one to accept Jews as students. The Venetian conquest in 1405 obliged the Jews to sell their homes and lands and limited the interest rates ...

Mainz

Germany > The Rhineland and Bavaria

At the height of the Middle Ages, the Jewish community in Mainz rivaled the communities of Worms and Speyer. Few traces of this community remain. Among several stone tombs preserved in the Jewish cemetery is that of Rabbi Gershom ben Yehuda (c. 960-1028), called Meor ha-Golah (Light of the Exile). A A has replaced the old one. It was built in 2010 and is part of the Jewish Community center ...

Ghent

The first communities were established in Ghent in the thirteenth century. After the Jews’ expulsion, there was no trace of a Jewish presence until the eighteenth century. The reputation of Ghent’s university attracted many Romanian and Russian Jews, who formed the famous “generation of engineers”. During World War II, the solidarity of their non-Jewish fellow citizens ...

Czech Republic

Below the bell tower of Prague's Jewish city hall, there are two clock faces. One displays Roman numerals, and the other Hebrew letters. The hands of the first clock revolve in the normal clockwise direction while those of the second turn counterclockwise, following the customary manner of reading Hebrew right to left. Such clocks are rare, and this is the only one of its kind adorning a ...

The Île de la Cité

The sculptures on the Saint Anne portal of (Notre Dame de Paris) offer one of the most moving testimonies we have to medieval Judaism. The frieze in question, just above the doorway, dates from the late twelfth century. It represents the Virgin’s mother, Saint Anne, meeting her future husband, Saint Joachim. The unknown artist used Parisian Jews as his models in order to represent ...