An exhibition of photographs by Joanna Sliwa-Cichon opens Saturday (May 24) in the former synagogue in Dzierzoniow, Poland, which since 2004 has been under gradual restoration by members of the Beitenu Chaj-2004 Foundation. During the opening, selected photos will be available for purchase. All proceeds will go to support the restoration of the synagogue, which is listed as a landmark. The building is now being used for cultural purposes: during the renovation, it reopened for Rosh Hashanah services in 2009..
Built in 1875, the box-shaped neo-Romanesque synagogue was used by the local Jewish community until the Germans 1937 closed it down and sold it in 1937. At that time, Dzierzoniow was part of Germany and known as Reichenbach.
After World War II and until the 1980s, the synagogue again was used for religious purposes by a renewed Jewish community of thousands of Holocaust survivors who had been liberated from the concentration camps, who had survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, or who had fought as partisans in Polish forests.
Most of these people emigrated, and by the 1980s only a handful of Jews lived in the town; the synagogue was abandoned and became derelict.
