Thanks to a tense but positive vote this week by the municipal council of Czarny Dunajec in southern Poland, work will proceed on the restoration project for the town’s long disused former synagogue. The joint project to restore both it and the synagogue in nearby Trstená, Slovakia received EU funding last year. The two towns are already linked by a bicycle route.
The cross-border project, for which the municipalities of the two towns had received a grant of more than €2.4 million from the Interreg Poland-Slovakia’s “Borderlands of many cultures – borderlands of dialogue” program, is to restore the two synagogues and create in them civic centers of education, community, local history, and dialogue.
To proceed, the project needed the approval of the municipalities, which also must contribute funding. Failure to approve the plan would have scuttled the project and lost all the EU funding.
A political dispute, however, threatened municipal approval in Czarny Dunajec.
The city had purchased the synagogue building from the Krakow Jewish community in September with the aim of restoring it, and plans for a Center for Dialogue and House of Remembrance of the Czarny Dunajec Land were publicized two years ago. But when it came to a vote to move forward this month, some council members claimed lack of transparency and/or even raised objections that the building to be restored had been a synagogue.
“The case of the synagogue shows how difficult it is to combine the protection of cultural heritage with local politics,” wrote the Malapolska Online news site. “On the one hand – residents were given the chance to restore an important monument, on the other – local tensions, lack of unanimity and a dispute over investment priorities led to a situation where millions of euros could [be lost] irretrievably.”
Watch a video posted in 2023 by the municipality of Czarny Dunajec showing the current state of the synagogue and some plans for the House of Remembrance:
Read the details of the project (in Polish)