Synagoga Wysoka, Kraków

Synagoga Wysoka, or High Synagogue, is a former Orthodox synagogue in Kraków’s Kazimierz district, now a Jewish museum. Completed in 1563, its upper-floor prayer hall makes it Kraków’s tallest synagogue. Surviving traces of its historic interior recall the building’s devastated wartime past.

Synagoga Wysoka is the former Orthodox synagogue at Józefa 38 in Kazimierz, now used as a Jewish museum. Its name means “High Synagogue” for a practical reason: its prayer hall was placed on an upper floor above street-level shops. That arrangement makes it Kraków’s tallest synagogue and the only Polish synagogue whose main sanctuary occupies an upper storey.

Completed in 1563, it was the third synagogue built in Kazimierz. A wealthy merchant named Israel secured royal permission from Sigismund the Second Augustus and financed its construction. The building is Renaissance in style, a period that favoured balanced, classically inspired forms.

Notice the memorial plaque on the outer wall, topped by a Star of David and inscribed with the synagogue’s Yiddish name. It marks both the building’s original purpose and the destruction inflicted on it by the German occupiers in 1939. The Nazis stripped and ruined the interior, but a seventeenth-century baroque Hanukkah lamp survived because it had been taken to Wawel Castle; it is now displayed in the Old Synagogue on Szeroka Street. Inside, the surviving stone niche for the Torah ark and traces of painted decoration preserve fragments of the former prayer space.