Archaeologists have begun research at the site of the destroyed Goldberg synagogue in Otwock, near Warsaw, where significant remnants of the building — the town’s main synagogue before WW2 — were discovered this past summer during construction of a new bicycle path.
“We knew that there was a synagogue, but we did not know if something remained underground, because nothing was visible on the surface,” local historian Sebastian Rakowski, President of the Society of Friends of Otwock and collaborator of the Social Committee for the Memory of Otwock Jews, told local Warsaw TV in July.
The Masovian provincial conservator of monuments (WUOZ) announced start of the archaeological work in a Facebook post last week, with a series of photos showing the work in progress.
“We documented, among others: the entrance to the building, the overturned southwest wall of the building and large fragments of columns with partially preserved polychrome,” the Wykop na Poziomie archaeologic service, which is carrying out the archaeological work on behalf of WUOZ, said on Facebook.
Otwock was established as a health resort on the Vistura River near Warsaw in the latter part of the 19th century. It became very popular among Polish Jews and had a number of synagogues, prayer houses, and other religious infrastructure. Before the Holocaust it had a majority Jewish population.
The Goldberg synagogue was erected in 1927 on the private property of Szlama and Chawa Goldberg, according to a history of the Jewish community by Sebastian Rakowski on a web site devoted to the Jewish history of the town. Designed by the architect Eugenia Jablonska, it could seat 650 people.
It was torched by the Nazis in October 1939 and destroyed along with Otwock’s other synagogues.
History of Otwock Jews (in English) on the Otwock Jewish History web site