Poland -- another synagogue restoration wins award

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The restoration of the synagogue in Ostrow Wielkopolski has won the "Facade of the Year" award for historic building preservation.

This is the second announcement this month of a synagogue restoration in Poland garnering an award, joining the synagogue in Zamosc, for whose restoration the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland won the 2011 Conservation Laurel, an annual award granted by the regional authorities and monuments conservator in eastern Poland's Lubelskie Region, where Zamosc is located

I posted about the Ostrow restoration project last fall, providing links to the town web site with a lot of photographs illustrating the transformation.

Poland -- detailed web pages on synagogue restoration

 

 Synagogue facade illuminated. Photo: Wikicommons

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The large Moorish-style synagogue in the southwest-central Polish town of Ostrow Wielkopolski, originally built in the late 1850s, has been under restoration this year -- and the town's web site has an ample set of pages documenting the process, including photographs, description in English as well as Polish, and also a video.

The 7 million zloty ($2.1 million) project is being financed primarily by the European Union, which is providing 70 percent of the funding, as well as by the city according to the web site. The city obtained ownership of the building in 2006, when the city paid 225,000 zloty (c. $75,000) to the Jewish community of Wroclaw in exchange for the community withdrawing its claim on the building. For its part, the city agreed to create lapidary memorials at the sites of the town's two destroyed Jewish cemeteries.

The exterior restoration has been completed (or nearly so) and work on the building's interior goes on.