Synagoga Remuh, Kraków

Synagoga Remuh is an Orthodox synagogue on Szeroka Street in Kazimierz, named for Rabbi Moses Isserles. Kraków’s second-oldest Jewish house of prayer, it was rebuilt in masonry after a fire in 1557 and later restored after wartime devastation. It remains the city’s only synagogue with regular services.

Synagoga Remuh, inside the walled courtyard at forty Szeroka Street, is Kraków’s Orthodox synagogue, named for Rabbi Moses Isserles. His Hebrew initials, ReMA, give the building its familiar name, Remuh. Notice the Hebrew writing above the courtyard gate: this small sanctuary and the cemetery beside it form an exceptional surviving ensemble of sixteenth-century Jewish religious architecture.

It began as Kraków’s second-oldest Jewish house of prayer and was first called the New Synagogue. Israel ben Josef, a royal merchant and banker, pursued permission from King Sigismund the Second Augustus to turn his own house into a synagogue from 1553 onward. The royal consent arrived on the twelfth of November 1556.

A fire destroyed the synagogue on the first of April 1557, and it was rebuilt in masonry soon afterward. Inside, the Holy Ark includes a carved element from 1558, preserved through the building’s many alterations. During the German occupation, the synagogue was stripped of much of its furnishing and used to store firefighting equipment, but the building survived.

Restoration between 1958 and 1968 reconstructed the bimah from pre-war photographs. Remuh remains Kraków’s only synagogue with regular services.