Patrick Comerford
Tomorrow marks Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD), which takes place each year on 27 January. The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day this year (2024) is Fragility of Freedom.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust encourages remembrance in a world scarred by genocide. The day remembers the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of people murdered under Nazi persecution of other groups and during more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
The date 27 January was chosen because it marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, on 27 January 1945.
This year, 27 January is also Shabbat Shirah, the Sabbath of Singing, in the Jewish calendar. Many congregations highlight this Shabbat by creating services brimming with extraordinary music to celebrate Moses and Miriam leading the people out of Egypt and across the Red Sea of Reeds into liberation and freedom. Shabbat Shirah we celebrates a very special moment in the Torah, a very musical moment in Jewish biblical history.
Each year on Holocaust Memorial Day, thousands of people come together to learn about the past and to take action to create a safer future. The Holocaust threatened the fabric of civilisation, and genocide must still be resisted every day. This world often feels fragile and vulnerable and we cannot be complacent. Even in Britain, prejudice and the language of hatred must be challenged by all.
This year’s theme, ‘Fragility of Freedom’, was inspired by words written by Anne Frank in her diary after the Germans invaded the Netherlands: ‘That is when the trouble started for the Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees.’
Anne Frank and her family went into hiding. But they were betrayed and Anne died in Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, three months short of her 16th birthday. Her comment concludes: ‘You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that, but life went on’. But of course, for Anne Frank, and millions of others, life did not go on. Building on the multiple restrictions on their freedoms, their freedom of life was destroyed, and they were deliberately murdered.
Like many people who have visited Auschwitz, I have stayed in Kazimierz, the historic Jewish district of Kraków, where I have visited many of the surviving synagogues and Jewish sites. They include seven of the most prominent synagogues in Kazimierz: the Old Synagogue, the High Synagogue, Remu'h Synagogue, Wolf Popper Synagogue, the Tempel Synagogue, Kupa Synagogue and the Izaak Jakubowicz Synagogue.
The synagogues of Kraków represent virtually all the European styles of architecture, including the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, and the Modernist. They were built between the end of the 15th century and the end of the 19th century, and are on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Three of these synagogues are still active, some also serve as houses of prayer, and the district also has two Jewish cemeteries. The architectural historian Carol Herselle Krinsky regards the Izaac Synagogue as ‘the most architecturally important’ of all the old synagogues of Kraków.
So, I was saddened to learn through Jewish Heritage Europe earlier this week that the structural integrity of the 17th century Izaak Jakubowicz Synagogue, a jewel of Kazimierz, is seriously threatened by large cracks that have appeared in its high barrel vault.
In an announcement on Facebook earlier this month, the Social Committee for the Restoration of Kraków Monuments (SKOZK) pledged support to save the Baroque building, which dates from 1644.
The announcement on Facebook declared dramatically: ‘One of the most precious monuments of Jewish culture in Poland is dead.’
The Izaak Jakubowicz Synagogue is the largest synagogue in Kazimirz. It is believed to have designed by either the Italian-born architect Francesco Olivierri or Giovanni Trevano, an Italian royal architect working in Kraków in the mid-17th century, and its construction was completed in 1644.
The Izaak Synagogue is noted for its colourful wall paintings of prayers and ritual imagery, as well as the elaborate stucco work on the vault, which soars to a height of 14 metres.
After cracks appeared on the vault above the prayer hall in the synagogue in 2018, investigations showed large and wide cracks that were spreading and that the surface of the vault is decaying and can no longer bear the load.
Last year, with the support of SKOZK, a technical project began in an effort to secure the vault and its beautiful stucco decorations, using carbon fibre tapes that fasten the vault from the roof.
The report concluded that the ‘the basic cause of the damage’ appeared to be ‘the faulty geometry of the vault structure … compounded by other problems, including, above all, deformation of the roof structure.’
Less serious cracks had already been detected in the vault in 1988, it said, and renovation in the late 1980s and early 1990s had seemed to have resolved the problem. But, ‘as it turned out, this was a wrong assumption.’
Maciej Wilamowski, director of the SKOZK office, was quoted in local media as describing the situation as ‘truly one of the most serious failures in a monument of this class in Kraków in recent decades. It covers the entire vault above the nave.’
Reports estimate the repairs will involve considerable costs, because the technology involving the installation of carbon fibres from the top is expensive. Other proposals would have involved removing and replacing a very large part of the 17th-century stucco work.
The Izaak Synagogue (Synagoga Izaaka), formally known as the Isaak Jakubowicz Synagogue, dates from 1644 and is named for its donor, Izaak Jakubowicz, who died in 1673. He was also known as Isaac the Rich, a banker to King Ladislaus IV of Poland. The founding legend of the synagogue was first told in the early 19th century by the Polish rabbi, Simcha Bunim of Peshischa.
The interior walls of the synagogue are decorated with painted prayers, visible once again after conservation removed covering layers of paint. The vaulted ceiling is decorated with baroque plasterwork wreaths and garlands.
Before the Nazi occupation of Poland, the synagogue boasted a widely-admired, wooden, baroque Aron haKodesh or holy ark. On 5 December 1939 the Gestapo came to the Kraków Judenrat building and ordered Maximilian Redlich, the Jewish official on duty that day, to burn the scrolls of the Torah. When Redlich refused he was shot dead. The Nazis then destroyed the interior and furnishings, including the bimah and Aron haKodesh.
After the war, the synagogue was used as a sculpture and conservation workshop and then by a theatre company as a studio and for storing props. Until recently it was an exhibition space. A fire in 1981 damaged the interior. Renovation work began in 1983 and the building was returned to the Jewish community in 1989. It is a practicing Orthodox synagogue once again, and houses Kraków’s Chabad Lubavitch community and the Jewish Education Centre.
Holocaust Memorial Day this year is an opportunity to reflect on how freedom is fragile and vulnerable to abuse. It is an invitation to pledge not to take our freedoms for granted, and to consider what we can do to strengthen freedoms around the world.
• Holocaust Memorial Day is being marked in Milton Keynes tomorrow (27 January 2024) with a short service at 2 pm at the Milton Keynes Rose, including readings and a performance by a local choir.
Shabbat Shalom
