Husiatyn Synagogue, urban-type settlement of Husiatyn

The synagogue in the center of Husiatyn was no exception for the towns of Galicia in the 17th century. Created at the end of the 16th century with the assistance of the Kalynovskyi family, it served as the religious and cultural center of the city’s Jewish community, which reached three thousand people, whose interests were called upon to protect, acting as an independent defense center in the event of a city defense breakthrough.

Restored after a fire in 1742, the Husiatyn synagogue appears in a new face, having almost lost all its distinctive defensive features, it acquires Moorish-Gothic decorative elements in the decoration of the external facades and a major reconstruction of the interior.

With the advent of the 18th century, improved military equipment and tactics of warfare make their own adjustments to the architecture of cities: individual buildings are no longer counted as defensive units and, as a result, are rebuilt in the style of civil architecture with decorative elements. It is as a result of these trends that the synagogue in Husiatyn is supplemented with new premises created for creative purposes – a cheder school, a women’s prayer hall.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the still powerful Jewish community of Husiatyn, through joint efforts, was once again reconstructing the stronghold of their faith. However, the periodic change of citizenship due to political decisions and wars, and as a result – a change in the power of the retaining officials, whose actions were often anti-Semitic in nature, led to a gradual reduction in the Jewish community in Husiatyn.

And the Second World War (1939 – 1945) only aggravated the already difficult situation of the community: the arrival of the Red Army (1939), and two years later – the Germans of the prizes for the final extermination of the Jews of the city through resettlement or destruction, and to support the Jewish temple in Husiatyn. there is simply no one. As a result of hostilities, the synagogue got rid of part of the northern and western walls.

It took a long nineteen years to wait for the renewal of the stronghold of the Jewish faith in Husiatyn. In 1964, a decision was made to restore the XVI architectural monument. After ten years of restoration (in 1974), it was not the synagogue, but the Husiatyn Museum of Local Lore that opened its door in all its beauty of the early twentieth century.

But the museum building immediately experienced problems associated with the architectural features of the roofs restored without taking into account the climatic features of the area: wooden elements do not withstand precipitation and moisture penetrates into the room.

A critical moment in the fate of the building, which came at a difficult time in the formation of Ukraine’s independence (early 90s of the twentieth century), when funds to support architectural monuments ran out, forced the museum to simply close the doors and take out all the exhibits.

Initially (XVI century), the construction of the synagogue in Husiatyn was a rectangular (15.6 m x 17.2 m) four-tiered room, the thickness of the walls of which reached 2.16 m, where the first tier was cut through loopholes for cannons, the second and third – for muskets, and the fourth (Renaissance attic) – lancet loopholes. The combination between the tiers was due to a stone staircase in the thickness of the wall, located in the northwestern part of the building at the intersection of the cheder schools attached from the west and a prayer hall for women from the north.

In the middle of the 17th century, the Jewish temple was significantly rebuilt: the embrasures of the first tier were walled up; the loopholes of the second and third are cut into eight-meter Gothic windows; the interior is stripped of its superficial divisions and transformed into a single prayer hall 13.5 m high with iconic architectural features (aron ha-kodesh, an altar, “roses” on the facades, a rib vault); The attic is decorated with a white-stone parapet made of acanthus leaves with towers round in the perimeter at the corners.

A century later, in the spirit of the trends of Jewish temple building in the 18th century, the Husiatyn synagogue received a three-tiered “women’s gallery” instead of a prayer hall for women, which entered the main volume of the house along with a prayer hall for men.

Sourse: Пам’ятки UA