The Wołpa Synagogue was a

synagogue A synagogue, also called a shul or a temple, is a place of worship for Jews and Samaritans. It is a place for prayer (the main sanctuary and sometimes smaller chapels) where Jews attend religious services or special ceremonies such as wed ...

located in the town of Vowpa, in what is now western

Belarus Belarus, officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east and northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Belarus spans an a ...

. It was reputed to be the "most beautiful" of the

wooden synagogues of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth Wood is a structural tissue/material found as xylem in the stems and roots of trees and other woody plants. It is an organic materiala natural composite of cellulosic fibers that are strong in tension and embedded in a matrix of lignin tha ...

, a "masterwork" of wooden

vernacular architecture Vernacular architecture (also folk architecture) is building done outside any academic tradition, and without professional guidance. It is not a particular architectural movement or style but rather a broad category, encompassing a wide range a ...

History

The synagogue was built in , and altered in minor ways several times. In 1929 the building was listed as a Polish Monument of Culture. It was burnt by the Germans during the

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

, believed to be in November 1942.

Architecture

The main hall was with a vaulted ceiling described as having been "the most magnificent of all known wooden ceilings" in Europe. Of course, since Christians were free to build with brick and stone, few European buildings of the scale of the Wolpa synagogue were ever built in wood. The walls of the main hall were 7.2 meters high. The vaulting, under a three-tiered roof, rose to a height of fourteen meters in three tiers marked by fancy balustrades. Each tier was made up of several curving sections faced in wooden paneling to form a graceful, tiered and vaulted dome. The vaulted ceiling was supported by the four wooden corner columns that rose from the bimah, and by trusses in the roof. The

Torah Ark A Torah ark (also known as the ''hekhal'', , or ''aron qodesh'', ) is an ornamental chamber in the synagogue that houses the Torah scrolls. History The ark is also known as the ''ark of law'', or in Hebrew the ''Aron Kodesh'' () or ''aron ha-Kod ...

was an elaborate, multi-tiered confection in painted, carved wood, with columns, bas-relief menorahs, vases, floral swags, roofed towers, the tablets of the Ten Commandments and an eagle. In the early nineteenth century, the vaulted ceiling was painted in a "dark sapphire" color spangled with "glistening" gold stars. The walls were painted in naive

Trompe-l'œil ; ; ) is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a Two-dimensional space, two-dimensional surface. , which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into perceiving p ...

style to resemble a Classical masonry building. Polish Jewish communities were routinely denied permission to build in masonry. The exterior featured a three-tiered roof and a pair of elaborate corner pavilions with two-tiered roofs over elaborate vaulted ceilings. In 1997, the

Yiddish Book Center The Yiddish Book Center (formerly the National Yiddish Book Center), located on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States, is a cultural institution dedicated to the preservation of books in the Yiddish language, ...

on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, the world's largest repository of Yiddish books and literature, chose to model its building on existing photographs of the Wolpa Synagogue. In 2015, an exact replica of Wolpa Synagogue was built in

Biłgoraj Biłgoraj (, ''Bilgoray'', ) is a town in south-eastern Poland with 25,838 inhabitants as of December 2021. Since 1999 it has been situated in Lublin Voivodeship; it was previously located in Zamość Voivodeship (1975–1998). It is located sou ...

, Poland. In 2024, the VR reconstruction of the Wolpa Synagogue was released by the Belarusian-Jewish Cultural Heritage Center. The project features hand-restored paintings based on extensive academic research. The virtual reconstruction includes two versions of the interior: before and after renovation in 1920s, and shows a 360-degree view of the present-day location. bjch.center/shtetlwolpa/eng Virtual reconstruction of the Wolpa synagogue

Virtual reconstruction of the Wolpa synagogue

References

External links

The synagogue of Wołpa

Virtual Shtetl The Virtual Shtetl () is a bilingual Polish-English portal of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, devoted to the Jewish history of Poland. History The Virtual Shtetl website was officially launched on June 16, 2009 by founder A ...

2010
Wooden Synagogue in Voupa (Volpa, Wołpa), Belarus
in the Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art, the

Center for Jewish Art The Center for Jewish Art (CJA) is a research institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, devoted to the documentation and research of Jewish visual culture. Established in 1979, it documented and researched objects of Jewish art in ca. 800 ...

, the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; ) is an Israeli public university, public research university based in Jerusalem. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann in July 1918, the public university officially opened on 1 April 1925. ...

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