Narewka

19th-century Wooden Synagogue
on Szkolna Street (now Ogrodowa Street)

(Scroll down to see commemorative plaque erected at the
site of the destroyed synagogue on February 28, 2019)



Narewka's Wooden Synagogue formerly on Szkolna Street, drawn by Jarosław Wojtach
(from Tomasz Wisniewski's Synagogues and Jewish Communities in the Bialystok Region, p. 178.)
(Permission granted by Tomasz Wisniewski on 30 December 2010)

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Narewka's mid-19th-century, two-story, gable-roofed wooden synagogue stood on Skolna Street, now Ogrodowa Street. It served as a place for Jewish religious worship, prayer and study and communal gathering. While some say it was burned down by Jewish townspeople because it had been desecrated during the Soviet occupation of 1939-1941, when it was turned into a grain storehouse (Wizniewski, Jewish Bialystok and Surroundings in Eastern Poland), it may have been destroyed by or under the pressure of Soviet or German authorities prior to the destruction of the Narewka Jewish community and the massacre of many of its Jewish residents by Nazi Police Battalion 322 on August 15, 1941.

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Plaque - Shiviti, probably from the synagogue in Narewka
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw
Click on Image for description on Museum's Central Judaica Database


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Ogrodowa Street (formerly Szkolna Street) - Site of former Synagogue and religious school
(Photograph Copyright © 2010 Joy Kestenbaum)




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Zvika Birenbaum, principal of the Adar School in Zichron Yaacov, Israel, standing before the recently
erected marker commemorating the site of the destroyed synagogue in Narewka, December 2018.
(Courtesy of Zvika Birenbaum)
 



Paulah Wremiuk, English teacher at the school in Narewka, holding the commemorative plaque
in December 2018, before it was erected on the site where the synagogue stood.
(Courtesy of Paulah Wremiuk)




Invitation to the ceremony held 28 February 2019 to unveil the commemorative plaque
to honor and remember the destroyed synagogue in Narewka and its Jewish community.
The monument and the ceremony were planned by the primary school, mayor and community
in Narewka with the Adar School and Birenbaum Family from Israel.





Article from Israel Hayom (18 December 2018) - "Israeli and Polish schools join
to memorialize the burned [Narewka] synagogue,"erected just prior to the "10th day of the Hebrew month
of Tevet (Dec. 18), the day of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and the day in which the Jewish prayer
for the dead, Kaddish, is recited for those who perished in the Holocaust and have not graves."
(Courtesy Zvika Birenbaum)

https://www.israelhayom.com/2018/12/18/israeli-and-polish-schools-join-to-memorialize-destroyed-synagogue




Text of plaque:

Narewka's Jewish Community Synagogue
 Narewka's two floor wooden
synagogue was located here.
The synagogue could fit a few
hundred people and was used for
prayers as well as for Jewish studies
 ("Cheder" - "Talmud Torah").
The Jewish community in Narewka
lived in peace with all its neighbours
until it was decimated by the Nazi
Germans in August 1941.
In Memory of Narewka's
Jewish Community