The political and communal tensions behind Jewish heritage preservation in Poland

There's a misconception among those with only a casual interest in Jewish heritage in Poland: that when a property is restored to a Jewish community through the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, its preservation is thereby assured and it will be developed in a manner befitting its historical and cultural significance.

Such views ignore the stark economic realities and tensions inherent among the communities and institutions that hold a stake in such projects.

This is purely anecdotal, but what struck me when speaking to Jews in Wrocław and Poznań is the sheer heterogeneity of Jewish perspectives in Poland; there seems to be no dominant or cohesive outlook, only a wide spectrum of individual positions. I believe this speaks to the diversity inherent in Jewish communities in Poland, with a mix of secular/cultural and religiously observant Jews, and a newer cohort of young adults rediscovering their Jewish ancestry. There is also the "silent generation" of Jews in Poland—shaped by communist-era pogroms and sustained pressure to assimilate—some of whom in recent years have felt able to re-emerge and contribute to the renewal of Jewish cultural life in the country.

However, one consistent thread that I've encountered when speaking with Jews in Poland is an apathy, sometimes bordering on hostility, toward German cultural artifacts, including the German-era synagogues in western regions of the country. Although many of these sites have been legally returned to Jewish communal ownership, the vast majority of Jews in Poland today are of Polish heritage rather than German-Jewish descent, and the cultural or emotional investment in restoring German-period buildings is limited. In some cases, these structures are viewed less as part of a cultural lineage than as remnants of a community that no longer exists and to which today's Polish Jews may feel little attachment.

Economic reality is an additional and often decisive factor. The New Synagogue in Poznań, for example, is a vast and deteriorating structure that would require substantial financial resources to stabilise and adapt to contemporary use. Even when it was built in the early twentieth century, Poznań's Jewish community was relatively small, and today it's far smaller still. The scale of the building exceeds the needs or capacities of the present community, which lacks both the demographic base and the institutional funding to undertake such a project. As with many restituted properties across Poland, the gap between symbolic heritage and practical feasibility is acute, and the absence of sustained interest or investment reflects this structural mismatch rather than neglect alone. The synagogue was sold to a private investor in 2016, whose plans to convert it into a hotel were complicated by the building's entry into the register of historical monuments in 2024. It's currently on the market for PLN 35 million (€8.2 million).

There's a similar lack of consensus surrounding the fate of the New Synagogue in Wrocław. The building was completely destroyed. What remains is a boundary wall and foundations, set in an overgrown wasteland between a kindergarten and the Uniformed Services High School on ul. Łąkowa. There's talk of the land being sold for residential development, with the Bente Kahan Foundation and members of Wrocław's Jewish community continuing to resist.

It could be worse. In Wolsztyn (formerly Wollstein), the synagogue was rebuilt during the post-war period in concrete to approximate the silhouette and scale of the original structure. It's unclear why the building was resurrected in this way, given that it later served as the Tatra cinema (Kino Tatra) before being purchased by a meat merchant specialising in pork products—an incongruous use given the cultural and religious context. It eventually became vacant before being gutted by a fire at the end of 2009, with contemporary reports indicating that the fire may have been deliberately set.

Across Poland, however, there are examples of more constructive approaches to Jewish heritage. In cities with surviving pre-war Jewish communities or where stronger institutional frameworks exist—such as Kraków, Warsaw, Łódź, and Tykocin—historic synagogues have been restored or repurposed with considerable care. Some now function as museums or cultural centres, others as active places of worship, and still others as educational spaces dedicated to documenting local Jewish history. These projects, often the result of partnerships between municipal authorities, heritage organisations, and academic institutions, demonstrate that when interest, funding, and consensus align, the preservation of Jewish cultural sites is both possible and meaningful.

When I was in Głogów recently, I was reassured to see that the foundations of the former synagogue there have been reconstructed to mark the site and acknowledge its historical role within the city's pre-war Jewish community. The intervention is modest but nonetheless represents a clear, collective decision to memorialise rather than erase, in a city with effectively no Jewish community to speak of.

I've seen this in the UK, in Bradford, where local Muslim community groups helped save the synagogue on Bowland Street, the local Jewish congregation having all but disappeared by the late twentieth century.

The Historic Synagogues of Europe project, supported by the Foundation for Jewish Heritage and the Center for Jewish Art, provides a comprehensive record of historic synagogues across Europe.