Long-time partners of the Hesed-Menachem Foundation and the Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine” offered the audience of the Open Lecture a lesson dedicated to the role of the synagogue in the life of the Jewish people. The Museum’s research associate, Dr. Olena Ishchenko, highlighted the process of the emergence and development of the tradition of the synagogue system, focusing on what unites the synagogue with the Temple, and what makes these most important sacred Jewish institutions different. The audience of the Lecture also shared their own ideas about what problems Jews are solved in the synagogue and, conversely, what are the responsibilities of each member of the Jewish community in relation to the synagogue.

An important part of the lesson was the demonstration of the aesthetics of architectural solutions in the construction of the synagogue and its interior design. The luxurious video series allowed us to investigate the depths of centuries, to enjoy the beautiful buildings of synagogues of different historical eras and geographical continents. Architecture changed in accordance with the status of the Jewish community, the external influence of the architecture of the country of residence, general stylistic trends, and, ultimately, changing fashion trends. The audience saw simple houses from the times of late antiquity, defensive synagogues of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, magnificent buildings of the Baroque era and original modern structures.

Olena Ishchenko also spoke about how the synagogue is presented in the museum exposition: she showed a model of the Ostroh synagogue, a bimah, and a symbolic key from the choral synagogue of our city “Golden Rose”, donated to the Museum by the Chief Rabbi of the city of Dnipro and the region Shmuel Kaminetsky. The audience was greatly interested in the multimedia map, which among two hundred Jewish objects also marked the synagogues of Katerynoslav-Dnipro.

They also mentioned the problem of synagogues “affected” during the Russian-Ukrainian war: the largest in Ukraine, the Kharkiv Choral Synagogue, which was damaged by one of the first rocket attacks (March 2022), the building of the former synagogue in Bakhmut, which was damaged in December 2022, the Choral Synagogue in Odessa, which was destroyed in August 2025, etc. Some of the damaged synagogues have already been restored. We hope that all sacred buildings in Ukraine will be saved, and most importantly, that people weakened by the war will survive the hardships.