Znalezisko ze strychu synagogi Cytronów – artefakty z życia białostockiego getta

Abstract

In October 2022, a valuable discovery of Judaica was made at the Sleńdzinski Gallery in Białystok. The Sleńdzinski Gallery is a municipal cultural institution that consists of four branches. Its oldest building is the former Cytron Synagogue, probably built in 1936. It was built in memory of Samuel Cytron (1858–1935), a wealthy textile manufacturer and philanthropist, active in Suprasl and Bialystok. The synagogue survived the war and served the community of Bialystok’s Jews until the late 1960s. Later it was nationalised and its decoration was destroyed. Since 1992, it has housed the Sleńdziński Gallery. In 2022, it was designated as the headquarters of the Gallery’s Regional Research Department. Employees then entered the building’s inaccessible, unused attic and discovered there large quantities of destroyed Hebrew prints, mainly from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Prayer books predominate among them, but printed Bibles and Talmud with commentaries can also be found. Among the Talmudic literature there are several titles published in the first half of the 19th century. The oldest find is a penitential prayer book published in Zhovkva (now Ukraine) in 1795. Other artefacts related to the life of the synagogue include six wooden painted panels decorating the ceiling of the main prayer hall. Also found were a boy’s talit katan, destroyed tefillin, mezuzahs and offering tins of the Linas Ha Tzedek organisation. Secular objects were also discovered in the attic. These include fragments of clothing: a shirt sleeve, a bra, a stocking, a Star of David peeled from a garment, two children’s kaftans, as well as three photographs, two strands of hair and a round lens of glasses. Secular literature is represented by a fragment of a short story by Shalom Ash in Yiddish and fragments of other short works, shreds of newspapers and a completely unique, well-preserved booklet published in Bialystok in 1937 to commemorate the second anniversary of the death of Marshal Józef Piłsudski. Children’s items are well represented: a pre-war Polish history textbook, fragments of an illustrated Hebrew Bible, fragments of Hebrew booklets, and Soviet-era neatly illustrated Yiddish and mathematics textbooks and a block of Cyrillic letters. The secular objects give rise to the suspicion that during the time the Bialystok ghetto was in operation (1941–1943), people were forced to live in the synagogue in the face of its overcrowding. The objects found in the attic were presented in the temporary exhibition ‘Relics’ opened on 16.08.2023 to mark the 80th anniversary of the Bialystok Ghetto Uprising. It was later transformed into a permanent exhibition.