White Stork Synagogue

Transcript

The White Stork Synagogue opened in 1829, designed by Carl Ferdinand Langhans. It served a Jewish community that became an important part of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Breslau’s economic, intellectual and civic life.

During Kristallnacht in November 1938, Nazis vandalised the synagogue. It was not burned, unlike Breslau’s New Synagogue, partly because surrounding buildings made fire dangerous. Later the courtyard became an assembly point for Jews being deported.

The Jewish Community of Wrocław documents more than eight centuries of Jewish presence in the city, interrupted by exclusion and persecution. That history cannot be reduced to the Holocaust, but the Holocaust ruptured the German-Jewish world of Breslau almost completely.

After 1945 a new Jewish population, including Polish Jews, briefly made Lower Silesia an important centre of Jewish life before later emigration.

This one building therefore survives two enormous demographic transformations. Survival is not the same thing as continuity, but it gives continuity somewhere to stand.

Synthetic narration. Sources are linked below.

Sources

• City of Wrocław — History of Wrocław: key facts
• History Centre Zajezdnia — Permanent exhibition / post-war Wrocław
• Wrocław Jewish Community — History of the White Stork Synagogue
• Jewish Wrocław — Religion and the White Stork Synagogue