The Great City Synagogue ( uk, Велика міська синагога, pl, Wielka Synagoga Miejska we Lwowie) was a
synagogue
A synagogue, ', 'house of assembly', or ', "house of prayer"; Yiddish: ''shul'', Ladino: or ' (from synagogue); or ', "community". sometimes referred to as shul, and interchangeably used with the word temple, is a Jewish house of worshi ...
in the city of
Lviv
Lviv ( uk, Львів) is the largest city in western Ukraine, and the seventh-largest in Ukraine, with a population of . It serves as the administrative centre of Lviv Oblast and Lviv Raion, and is one of the main cultural centres of Ukraine ...
(Polish: ''Lwów'', German: ''Lemberg'') in what is now
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
. It was situated in the former Jewish Quarter near today's city centre.
History
Earlier synagogues
The first synagogue in Lviv was situated nearby in 29, Feodorova Street. It was a wooden building that was built around 1320. In 1527 a catastrophic fire destroyed parts of the city including the synagogue.
A new synagogue in the
Gothic style
Gothic or Gothics may refer to:
People and languages
*Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes
**Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths
**Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
was constructed in 54, Staroyevreiska Street in 1555. It served as the Great City Synagogue. Because it was a small building, in 1606, the role of the Great City Synagogue shifted to the
Golden Rose Synagogue. When this synagogue was becoming too small as well, the Jewish community began to construct a new, considerably bigger, synagogue on the site of the disassembled old synagogue, between 1799 and 1801.
New building
The construction of the new synagogue took place between 1799 and 1801. It was built in
Neoclassicist style. After the Jewish Community transferred the reliquaries from the Golden Rose Synagogue to the newly constructed synagogue in 1801, the latter became the main city synagogue.
It underwent some repairs and reconstructions until
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
. Nearly all of Lviv's synagogues were destroyed by the
Nazis
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...
; this one was blown up in 1943.
See also
*
List of synagogues in Ukraine
References
External links
{{Commons category, Great Synagogue in Lviv
The Space of Synagogues
Former synagogues in Ukraine
Synagogues in Lviv
Religious buildings and structures completed in 1801
19th-century synagogues
Synagogues destroyed by Nazi Germany
Buildings and structures demolished in 1943
Neoclassical synagogues
Synagogues completed in 1801