Old Synagogue

The prayer halls as the exhibition

The Museum of Kraków keeps the most valuable Judaica in its collection on the permanent exhibition at the Old Synagogue. The show opened on 30 April 2010 under the title “History and Culture of Kraków Jews”. Objects of Jewish ritual art are in the former men’s and women’s prayer rooms on the ground floor. The main hall is about the synagogue itself and about the festivals of the religious year: Shabbat, the New Year and the Day of Atonement, Sukkot, Hanukkah, Purim and Passover. The museum’s text says the most important cult object in a synagogue is the parchment scroll of the Torah. In a working synagogue those scrolls are kept in the Ark on the eastern wall. This exhibition, set in the actual interior of the former synagogue, shows the embroidered Ark curtains and the ornaments of the scrolls: embroidered mantles, silver crowns, tower finials called rimonim, shields, and the pointers the reader uses. A large part of the same room is the cycle of festivals and traditional men’s and women’s dress. The objects named include etrog boxes for Sukkot, Hanukkah lamps, bindings for the Book of Esther read at Purim, porcelain and silver seder plates and matzah bags for Passover, and spice boxes and kiddush cups used at home to open and close Shabbat. Paintings, photographs and postcards illustrate the customs, each with a text.

The former southern women’s hall is the family-life room. It covers dietary rules at home, daily prayer, and the life cycle from birth to death: birth amulets, a circumciser’s knife, scenes of study at home and in a religious school, arrangements and documents of the wedding, married life and divorce, and objects of funeral custom and of remembering the dead. The branch manager named on the page is Piotr Figiela. The address is ul. Szeroka 24. The phone at the branch is 12 422 09 62.

Lessons in the same rooms

The visiting regulations, in force from 11 August 2025, define an individual visit as 1 to 9 people and a group as 10 to 30. Education sessions on the branch page use those rooms rather than a separate classroom. A session for preschools and classes I–III, “A visit to the synagogue”, treats the building as a place of meeting, prayer and events in the life of the community. “New Year of the Trees”, for classes I–III and IV–VIII, starts from the four dates Jewish tradition calls a new year. A lesson for classes IV–VIII and secondary schools sets the Temple, the synagogue and the church side by side. From class VII the history session opens with why Jewish settlement appeared in Poland, and other sessions in that range cover the basics of Judaism, Hebrew and Yiddish, and Jewish sports clubs in Kraków under the title “Maccabees of sport”.