Wooden synagogues in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Wooden synagogues were a distinctive vernacular architectural tradition built by Jewish communities across the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, developing chiefly between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries during a prosperous period for Polish-Lithuanian Jewry. The art historian Stephen S. Kayser called them a truly original and organic manifestation of artistic expression, describing them as the only real Jewish folk art in history. The style flourished especially in the eastern parts of the Commonwealth, in territory now within Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, and favored small towns, villages and shtetls rather than major cities, in part because permits for masonry synagogues were difficult to obtain while timber was cheap and abundant. The buildings had plain exteriors that gave no hint of the elaborate interiors within, which featured multi-layered, high-pitched roofs with multi-beamed wooden domes, galleries and arches, and ceilings called rakia, the Hebrew word for sky, often painted blue with stars above a centrally placed bimah. Nearly all of these synagogues were destroyed by German forces during the Second World War, and none survive today in Poland, though a small number of examples remain in Lithuania.