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Pińczów Synagogue, built at the turn of the 17th century, is the last surviving Jewish monument in the city of Pińczów, once a thriving economic and cultural Jewish center. The synagogue is unusual both for its age as well as its adaptation of a Renaissance architectural style. (...)

Pińczów Synagogue, built at the turn of the 17th century, is the last surviving Jewish monument in the city of Pińczów, once a thriving economic and cultural Jewish center. The synagogue is unusual both for its age as well as its adaptation of a Renaissance architectural style. Inside, large sections of polychromic patterning, attributed to the Jewish painter Jehuda Leib, decorate the synagogue’s main prayer hall and porch. Interior murals, some of which date from the 1600s, are the oldest synagogue fresco paintings in the country. The town of Pińczów, which, for centuries, had benefited from its reputation for ethnic and religious diversity, was largely destroyed by German troops in the fall of 1939. The vast majority of the town’s Jewish population was later killed, many sent to Auschwitz, and much of the community’s cultural heritage destroyed. The synagogue itself was vandalized by Nazi occupation troops, and then damaged in fighting during the final year of the war.