Kazimierz Dolny Synagogue

The eighteenth-century synagogue stands a short walk east of the market square on Lubelska Street. It is a low, wide hipped-roof building, recently restored, and now functions as a cultural centre rather than a place of worship. The interior preserves the women's gallery and a few fragments of the painted decoration.

A few steps away is the Wailing Wall — a moving memorial of broken gravestones from the destroyed Jewish cemetery, set into a long wall with a vertical crack running through it to represent the rupture of the community. Together, the two sites give a sober counterpoint to the prettier side of the town's history.

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A story
Before the Second World War around half the town's population was Jewish, and Kazimierz was a major centre of Hasidic learning. The Nazis deported and murdered the entire community in 1942, and used the synagogue as a meeting hall. The Wailing Wall in the small square nearby is a memorial assembled in 1984 from the broken Jewish gravestones found scattered around the town after the war.

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