Maharshal's Synagogue

The synagogue was built around 1567 thanks to a privilege granted on August 25 of that year by the King of Poland, Sigismund II Augustus, to the Jews of Lublin. It was constructed on a plot donated by Dr. Isaac May. At the same time, the Jewish community received permission to build the first yeshiva, which was housed in the synagogue building. The fame of this yeshiva was so great that Jewish students from all over Europe came to study there. The synagogue was named in honor of the Lublin rector and rabbi Solomon Luria, known as Maharshal. There are accounts that the entire synagogue complex housed both the offices of the qahal and the first Lublin yeshiva. It also contained a small jail for those who committed offenses against the religion or the community. The likely remnant of this jail was a small prayer room in the vestibule of the synagogue, referred to in 19th-century documents as Shive Kryjem. During the Cossack-Moscow invasion of Lublin in 1655, the synagogue was completely burned down. == Architecture ==

The masonry building of the synagogue was constructed on an irregular rectangular plan, originally in a Renaissance and Baroque styles. There is no information about the layout of the synagogues before the fire of 1656. The only traces of their outlines before the 1856 fire are found on city plans from 1783, around 1800, 1823, and 1829. On all these plans, they stand out due to their size. The outline on the 1823 plan is similar to the measurement drawing from 1920. To this day, several photos, drawings, and architectural plans from the interwar period have survived, providing insight into the external appearance and interior of the synagogue. The elevations with characteristic vertical divisions with pilasters and semi-circular window openings indicated the building's two-story structure. Above the windows was a cornice that crowned the entire elevation. The building was covered with a triple-pitched broken roof, topped with sheet metal and gabled on the western side. The interior of the synagogue had two floors, a basement, and an attic. On the ground floor, there were 10 rooms: a vestibule, the Shive Kryjem synagogue, a staircase, the northern babinets, the babinets of the Maharam's Synagogue, a staircase, and a vestibule of the babinets. The upper floor also had 10 rooms: the main prayer hall, the western and northern babinets, and three staircases. The rooms on the floors were separated by walls with door openings for communication and also contained windows. The main prayer hall, encompassing two floors, was a square space measuring 16 by 16 m. It was topped by a vault consisting of four intersecting barrel vaults with lunettes, stretched between the walls and a massive central pier that supported the double-entry bema surrounded by a wrought-iron baluster. The bema stood on a square platform with four structural supports, each made up of three slender columns with Corinthian capitals. Above them, a richly segmented entablature supported a superstructure with semicircular arcades. This was crowned by a large cornice directly supporting the vault's ribs. On the eastern wall was a modest Renaissance-Baroque Torah ark, standing in the center of a large decorative structure flanked by pilasters and topped with the Tablets of the Ten Commandments, symbolically adorned by a pair of lions. To its right stood the cantor's pulpit. The low babinets were adjacent to the main hall from the north and west, likely added during the 1656 reconstruction. Through several small, barred windows, women could observe the service. The interior contained numerous candlesticks funded by the wealthiest Jews of Lublin. == Parochet ==

A velvet parochet, funded by women in 1925 or 1926, survived, measuring . Since 1945, ihe parochet has been used in the synagogue of the Jewish religious community in Bielsko-Biała in Bielsko-Biała. It is unknown how it came to be there. The fabric features, among other things, the Ten Commandments in Hebrew, topped with a Torah crown supported by a pair of lions, and below, a Hebrew inscription: == See also ==