Old Synagogue

What to expect

Szeroka street is lined with klezmer restaurants and tour groups, and at its southern end stands the reason the street exists. The Old Synagogue is the oldest surviving synagogue in Poland, and the room you walk into - two slim Tuscan columns, a wrought-iron bimah between them, a rib-vaulted ceiling overhead - is the main exhibit. The display cases stand around it. This is a branch of the Museum of Krakow, not a working synagogue; services are held a minute away at the Remuh Synagogue.

The permanent exhibition, “The History and Culture of Krakow’s Jews”, uses three interiors. The main prayer hall covers the synagogue and the festival year - Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Hanukkah, Purim, Pesach - through embroidered ark curtains, silver Torah crowns, rimonim, breastplates and pointers, plus traditional dress. The former southern women’s room turns to private life: dietary law, daily prayer, birth, the marriage contract, mourning.

What stays with most visitors is not the silver. The women’s room holds photographs and paintings of ordinary life in the Krakow community, and they carry the exhibition. The interior is austere, the windows small, the light low, and that is the point.

Allow 45 to 60 minutes; reviewers report anywhere from 40 minutes to two hours. Worth the ticket if you came for pre-war Jewish life or for Gothic architecture. If you came for the Holocaust, this is the wrong building - that story is told at Schindler’s Factory and the Eagle Pharmacy across the river. Three rooms, no screens, no interactive stations: children under ten hold out about fifteen minutes.

Tips

• Monday is free and the shortest day. Entry to the permanent exhibition costs nothing on Mondays, but the synagogue opens only 10:00 to 15:00, with last admission at 14:30. Free tickets come from bilety.muzeumkrakowa.pl or from the desk while places last.
• The combined ticket with the Eagle Pharmacy is 26 PLN. Four zloty more than the synagogue alone (22 PLN, reduced 16 PLN); the reduced combined ticket is 22 PLN and the family one 52 PLN. The catch: the pharmacy is closed Monday and Tuesday, so a combined ticket bought on those days is wasted.
• Last admission is 30 minutes before closing. That means 16:30 Tuesday to Sunday and 14:30 on Monday; groups are let in an hour before closing. This is the single most common complaint in visitor reviews - people turn up a quarter of an hour too late.
• Come at 9:00 for an empty room. Szeroka fills up around midday and free Monday draws a crowd. No booking is needed and there are no timed slots; buy at the desk inside the entrance.
• Photography is allowed, flash is not. Backpacks over 30 litres and long umbrellas are refused, and you may not eat or drink in the exhibition rooms.
• A dozen steps lead down to the forecourt, with no lift or ramp. There is no accessible toilet and no museum car park. Assistance dogs are welcome in every branch, and a sign-language interpreter can be arranged in advance on +48 12 422 09 62.
• The museum does not publish the language of the labels. It does not list the audio guide languages either; the audio guide costs 15 PLN and a guided tour of the permanent exhibition 280 PLN for the group. Call before you go if this matters to you.
• City cards are accepted. The Krakow Card, the Large Family Card, the Family Card and tourist cards all work at the desk - check yours before paying full price.

Getting there

The synagogue closes the southern end of Szeroka, the main square of Jewish Kazimierz, and every route from the Old Town takes about a quarter of an hour.

• On foot: 15 minutes from the Main Market Square down Grodzka and Stradom, or along Starowiślna; about 12 minutes from Wawel.
• Tram: the Miodowa stop on Starowiślna is a four-minute walk, plac Wolnica seven.
• By car: the museum has no car park and all of Kazimierz is a paid parking zone, with restricted access to Szeroka itself. Leave the car further out.

Nearby

• Galicia Jewish Museum - five minutes away on ul. Dajwór. The other half of the same story: photographs of what was left after the Holocaust rather than the objects of the life before it. Open daily until 18:00, 35 PLN.
• Eagle Pharmacy - plac Bohaterów Getta 18 in Podgórze, a 20-minute walk across the river. The ghetto years the synagogue exhibition does not cover, and the second half of the combined ticket. Closed Monday and Tuesday.
• Ethnographic Museum - plac Wolnica 1, at the other end of Kazimierz. The material culture of the same district seen from the peasant and burgher side, for 20 PLN.

Background

The synagogue was built in the late 15th century on the model of the twin-nave Gothic synagogues of Germany and Bohemia; the traditional dates of 1407 and 1492 are now rejected by scholars. After the fire of 1557 the Florentine architect Matteo Gucci rebuilt it, finishing in 1570 and adding the Renaissance parapet while keeping the twin-nave plan. A vestibule and two women’s prayer rooms followed in the 16th and 17th centuries, and restorations in 1904, 1913 and 1923 were designed by Zygmunt Hendel.

Tadeusz Kościuszko spoke here in 1794, calling on Jews to join the fight for the country’s freedom. In 1941, in the museum’s own words, the building “przejęta została przez niemiecki Urząd Powierniczy (Treuhandstelle) i użytkowana jako magazyn” - taken over by the German trusteeship office and used as a warehouse; the vault collapsed in late 1944. Reconstruction ran from 1956 to 1959 to designs by Józef Jamroz and Józef Ptak, and the museum branch opened on 30 October 1959 under an agreement between the Jewish Religious Community of Krakow and the city’s historical museum.