Content area
Full Text
THE SANCTUARY OF THE GREAT SYNAGOGUE IN LÓDZ was probably not, in actuality, sour-apple green. Yet in a late 19th- or early 20th-century postcard showcasing the synagogue's interior, colorized with an outré enthusiasm, a chandelier and sections of the bimah are the color of a doctor's-office lollipop.
That candy-tinted symbol of times past might, when applied to a different subject, elicit some nostalgia. But the Great Synagogue in Lódz, destroyed in 1939, is now a parking lot. A stone memorial commemorates the site, the last trace of the building - fluorescent interiors or not - that's left.
The fate of the synagogue mirrors that of the community that worshipped in it: In Lódz, only 10,000 members of what was once the second-largest Jewish community in Poland, with an estimated population of 230,000, survived the Holocaust.
The Lódz postcard is one of 14 featuring Polish synagogues in the recently opened exhibit "Lost Synagogues Of Europe" at the Museum at Eldridge Street on new York's Lower East Side. Poland is far from the only country represented; there are clusters of postcards showing synagogues from Germany, Vienna, Prague, Hungary, Bohemia, Slovakia, Romania, Moravia and Ukraine, as well as cards bearing images of daily Jewish life in those cities and countries.
"There [are] 156 synagogues represented," curator Nancy Johnson said. "Fifty-seven are still standing. Of those, only 14 are still synagogues."
For those whose Holocaust education was primarily focused on...