Synagoga Kupa, Kraków

Synagoga Kupa is a former synagogue in Kazimierz, completed in 1643 through donations from local craftsmen, traders, and goldsmiths. Known as the Synagogue of the Poor, it incorporates a stretch of the medieval defensive wall and preserves traces of its lost bimah, restored painted interior, and Torah Ark.

Synagoga Kupa, the former synagogue on Warszauera Street in Kazimierz, is the last synagogue built during the lifetime of Kazimierz as a Jewish town. It was also called the Synagogue of the Poor, because its congregation included the community’s poorest members. Its name comes from the Hebrew term for a charity collection box: craftsmen and small traders financed its construction, completed in 1643, with Kraków’s goldsmiths’ guild adding two hundred złotys.

The tall windows with rounded tops are the building’s only outward sign of its sacred purpose. Along the northern side, the synagogue incorporates part of Kazimierz’s medieval defensive wall. In the eighteenth century, after that wall no longer served as a defence, the building was substantially rebuilt and the prayer room received a wooden barrel vault.

The Nazi occupation wrecked the interior, destroying the bimah, the cantor’s lectern, and portable ritual objects. At the centre of the prayer hall, dark tiles now trace the foundations of that lost eight-sided bimah. Restoration completed between 2000 and 2002 renewed the Torah Ark and the wall and ceiling paintings, while this synagogue became a place for concerts, exhibitions, talks, and Jewish Culture Festival events.