July 2019
I decided to explore Pilsen after my delicious beer and lunch on the town square [see: Plzeň]. The old city center was not that big, but it showed that the city used to be rich. The residents enjoyed performances in a big, beautiful opera house and they also had Europe's second biggest synagogue!
A Viennese architect Max Fleischer drew up the original plans for the synagogue in Gothic style with granite buttresses and twin 65-meter towers. The cornerstone was laid on 2 December 1888 and that was about as far as it got. City Councillors rejected the plan in a clear case of tower envy as they felt that the grand erection would compete with the nearby Cathedral of St. Bartholomew.
Emmanuel Klotz put forward a new design in 1890 retaining the original ground plan and hence the cornerstone, but lowering the towers by 20m and creating the distinctive look combining Romantic and neo-Renaissance styles covered with Oriental decorations and a giant Star of David. The design was quickly approved and master builder Rudolf Štech completed work in 1893 for the bargain price of 162,138 florins. At the time the Jewish community in Plzeň numbered some 2,000.
The mixture of styles is truly bewildering; from the onion domes of a Russian Orthodox church, to the Arabic style ceiling, to the distinctly Indian looking Torah ark. The synagogue was used without interruption until the Nazi occupation of World War II. The synagogue was used as a storage facility during the war and was thereby spared from destruction. The Jewish community that retook possession of the synagogue at the end of hostilities had been decimated by the Holocaust. The last regular service was held in 1973, when the synagogue was closed down and fell into disrepair under communist rule.
(Wikipedia)
The structure now is semi-renovated and includes a small museum. As described, the place was a bewildering collection of styles under one roof. I liked it because it was so eclectic. I was shocked that such a prominent building wasn't at least on the tourism radar for Pilsen. Maybe being famous for beer was enough? What struck me the most (beyond the shock of such a large synagogue being in Pilsen of all places) was how much the interior (and exterior) looked like a church. I wondered why European Jews who had lived under something akin to "separate but equal" for centuries would have chosen to build a house of worship that could have been converted into a church with very little effort? Why not be totally different?
That building was the first of many abandoned synagogues I saw on that trip. Almost every one of them stood empty. A few had become cultural centers or museums, but overall most had some kind of memorial in the front and stood derelict. What does a country do with such a painful reminder of the past?
A memorial plaque does not erase that which we would prefer to forget.