The Last Synagogue of Poznań, Poland: Memory, Destruction, and the Silence of the Jewish Quarter

During my stay in Poznań, I stopped in the Old Town, in a district once known as the Jewish Quarter. From my hotel window, I could see an old, crumbling building, neglected and weathered. The clerk at the desk told me it had once been the town’s swimming baths. But I knew its history ran far deeper. This was the Great Synagogue of Poznań, and this is where the story begins.

At the edge of the Old Town, centuries of memory lie embedded in stones, courtyards, and narrow streets. This was once the vibrant heart of Jewish life in Poznań. The story stretches back nearly a thousand years. By the twelfth century, Jewish merchants and scholars had settled here. By the fourteenth century, a flourishing community had taken root north of the Market Square, near the Wroniecka Gate.

Here, synagogues, schools, study houses, and markets shaped daily life. In 1367, the Old Synagogue was built, making Poznań one of the oldest Jewish centres in Poland. Over the following centuries, as many as twenty synagogues rose within the quarter. The Jewish community became one of the most influential in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, taking a leading role in the Council of the Four Lands. Rabbis from Poznań shaped Jewish learning across Europe, while everyday life filled the streets with the sounds of prayer, trade, and family.

But history was rarely gentle. Fires, wars, and shifting borders scarred the quarter. Under Prussian rule, Jewish life faced restrictions, and compulsory use of the German language led to assimilation and departures. When Poland regained independence in 1918, only around three thousand Jews remained in Poznań on the eve of the Second World War.

Despite the decline, the community left a lasting mark. In 1904, a competition was held for a new synagogue, won by Berlin architects Wilhelm Cremer and Richard Wolffenstein. Their neo-Romanesque and neo-Moorish design, crowned with a great dome and Star of David, became Poznań’s proud symbol. Completed in 1907, it cost over 850,000 marks. On 5 September that year, Rabbi Wolf Feilchenfeld led the first Shema Yisrael prayer beneath its dome. The synagogue quickly became the heart of Jewish life.

Even as antisemitism grew, Poznań’s Jews remained committed to Poland. On 1 September 1939, as war broke out, Rabbi Jakub Sender led a prayer for victory. But just eight days later, the last service was held. The Nazis plundered the synagogue, stripped the Star of David from its dome, and converted it into a swimming pool for soldiers.

Jewish life was extinguished through deportations, executions, and forced labour. The foreshadowing had already come with the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, when 1,400 synagogues across Germany were destroyed. In Poznań, defiance had been strong: in January 1934, Jews gathered at the synagogue of the Brothers of Charity on Dominican Street to rally against Nazi persecution and call for a boycott of German goods.

During the war, many Jews and Poles were imprisoned in the Stadion Labour Camp. Survivor Samuel Bronowski recalled inmates surviving on just 200 grams of bread and a litre of turnip soup a day, with survival only possible thanks to the bravery of locals who smuggled food and never betrayed those who fled.

The landscape itself still bears scars of forced labour and desecration. Between 1941 and 1942, Jewish prisoners and Polish workers were forced to dig Lake Rusałka by hand. Countless lives were lost to exhaustion, beatings, and executions. Jewish tombstones were broken and used to reinforce the lake’s shores, where fragments remain beneath the water today.

After the war, only a few Jews returned to Poznań. The synagogue, still used as a swimming pool, stood as a stark reminder of what had been lost. Though proposals have surfaced to restore it, none have come to fruition. Today, the Jewish Quarter is quiet. Its streets no longer echo with the voices of those who once filled them.

Plaques and memorials now mark fragments of history. Walking down Stawna Street or standing beneath the abandoned arches of the Great Synagogue, one cannot help but feel the immense loss, but also the persistence of memory. The Jewish Quarter of Poznań no longer lives as it once did, yet its story endures. It remains written in the stones, in the silence that hangs in its courtyards, and in the resilience of remembrance.

This history is both tragic and essential. It is a testament to a community that shaped the soul of Poznań, whose spirit continues to echo in memory, long after the voices themselves were silenced.

So thank you for watching this short segment about Poznań. I hope you have learned something new. Please subscribe and watch the other films about the Jewish history of Poland.

Read my academic research on the subject https://www.academia.edu/144342661/St...