350-Year-Old Synagogue To Become Krakow’s Chabad Center

A monumental 350-year-old synagogue, ransacked by the Nazis, will become Chabad of Krakow’s headquarters during the Passover holiday. Synagogue of Isaac, a baroque-style building situated in the Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter, is an imposing grand space with ample room for Chabad’s growing menu of community and tourist services.

“It is an honor and a very big surprise that after only eight months since our arrival here, the Jewish Kehilla, under the leadership of Mr. Tuvyah Yakobovitch, is making a gift of this beautiful shul to Chabad of Krakow,” said Rabbi Eliezer Gurary, Chabad representative to Krakow.

Chabad of Krakow expects to make full use of the space with programs that cater to the 500 known Jews living in Krakow and the estimated half million Jewish tourists who visit historic and heart rending Jewish sites in Poland.

Major reconstruction will be necessary to restore the synagogue to its former glory will. A nook where the Torah ark once was, has gaped empty ever since the Nazis destroyed it on December 5, 1939. Since then the building served as a sculptor’s studio, theater prop house, and most recently as a Holocaust memorial, closed on Shabbat and Jewish holidays.

Rabbi Gurary intends to add a spiritual dimension to the tourist experience with a library, space for reflection and study, and a chance to put on tefillin. “After visiting Auschwitz, people want to do something positive, a mitzvah,” said Rabbi Gurary, explaining that Auschwitz is very close by. On an average day at the former death camps, Rabbi Gurary and his assistants generally help 300 tourists, students and Israeli visitors put on tefillin.

According to local folklore, funding for the synagogue was supplied by one Ajzyk Jakubowicz. Recurring dreams compelled the impoverished Jakubowicz to dig for treasure under a bridge in Prague. Scoffing, a bridge guard described his own dream about a treasure buried under an oven belonging to a fellow named Ajzyk Jakubowicz from Krakow. 

Jakubowicz hurried home and dug up the treasure in his own backyard and commenced building the synagogue in 1638. Propping up the legend’s credibility is the presence of Jakubowicz’s grave in the Krakow Remu Cemetery.  Prayers and community activities were ongoing at the Synagogue of Isaac until a Nazi shot a Jewish community official for refusing to burn the Torah scrolls in 1939.

Four years later, in 1943, Sue Roth was just eleven when she spent Passover in Auschwitz, a 90-minute train ride from Krakow. She doesn’t remember much about Passover in the camps; there was no matzah, no Seder.

“We were given one slice of bread and one piece of margarine. Dinner was soup, and if you were lucky you got a piece of horsemeat. There was one bowl for fourteen people,” she said. “We were so hungry. We ate whatever they gave us,”  she says, describing how she knelt in the ice for hours on end, as Auschwitz Nazi guards counted and recounted the 1000 women in her barrack.

Never did Sue, today a grandmother of Chabad Rabbi Chaim Rosenthal of Sydney and a great-grandmother three times over who lives in Southern California, dream that 100 Jews would celebrate a Passover Seder – out loud and proud – so close to concentration camp that robbed her of her youth and family.

And yet here where Jews and everything Jewish was systematically annihilated, there is a growing demand for kosher for Passover meals. Passover food needs of all sorts are stretching Rabbi Gurary’s workdays into the late evening. On Wednesday, he koshered the community’s kitchens for the holiday. During Passover he will be overseeing the kosher food facilities of the Krakow Holiday Inn. But he is most anxious to see who turns up to receive matzah from Chabad. Confessions of Jewish roots by dying grandparents have led a many young adults to the Gurarys’ door. 

“It seems like every two weeks I hear another amazing story,” said Rabbi Gurary.  “They come here and say they always felt Jewish but didn’t know why.”

Today, people are less afraid to reveal Jewish ties buried by their parents. Poland’s overtures to Israel are snowballing. According to the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, the Polish army buys Israeli Spike Missiles. Municipal funds have been allocated to build a Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Poland’s ambassador to Israel condemned Palestinian terror attacks. In recent years, Israeli investment in Poland climbed past the $2 billion mark.

Last week, Poland’s foreign ministry announced it would fund part of ‘Kol Polin’ a new 30-minute Hebrew language public radio broadcast. Hebrew section head Michael Hermon told the BBC that the program is to let people know that Jewish life in Poland is more than “museums and concentration camps.”

Chabad’s move into the historic synagogue this Passover is yet another joyful step forward in the renaissance of Krakow’s Jewish community.