Consult any search engine, look up ‘how many synagogues did the Nazis destroy’, then tell me how many results you saw that satisfactorily answered that question. You’ll get plenty of references to Kristallnacht, and a few similar incidents elsewhere in Europe, but that is it. Consulting Google Scholar is, likewise, going to fail to provide you with a definitive answer. It may be hard to believe, but nobody has published a study in English going over the fascist destruction of synagogues.
Why, then, do I suspect that the fascists destroyed more than one dozen thousand synagogues? Looking up the mundane-sounding ‘number of synagogues in Europe’ reveals results such as this one:
Out of 17,000 synagogues that existed before the Holocaust, only 3,318 are known to have survived, with only a quarter of that number still functioning.
In other words, the fascists apparently destroyed approximately eighty percent of Europe’s synagogues.
Now, if you have only a limited familiarity with Judaism, you may picture synagogues as simple buildings for a preacher’s congregants and the occasional wedding. However, few modern synagogues are as bare-bones as that. Synagogues tend to function not only as spots of worship but also as community centres: many of them have daycares, kitchens, offices, libraries, and classrooms. (In fact, the word ‘shul’ is cognate with and literally means ‘school’.) While losing a synagogue may not be quite as traumatic as losing your own house, it is not exactly a ‘clubhouse’ either.
With the number of Shoah education resources available, it is surprising what little they have to say regarding the Third Reich’s devastation of Jewish cultures, and specifically the synagogues. It is true that a building has nowhere near the same value as an innocent life, but demolition is often a means of terrorizing others: suspiciously after the Charleston massacre, unknown perpetrators destroyed several Black churches in a wave of arson. In these cases, the link between White supremacist intimidation and the devastation of a community’s property is clear. Why, then, should the Axis’s destruction of synagogues be limited to a few mentions?
There is certainly room for an analysis of the fascists’ systemic destruction of synagogues, and we can classify their abuses in the following ways:
Demolished — the perpetrators reduced these synagogues to an irreparable state. In the most horrifying cases, they trapped victims in these buildings before destroying them. Examples include the Riga synagogues in July 1941.
Damaged — the perpetrators only partially destroyed these buildings. A good example is the Dohány Street Synagogue, which the Arrow Cross Party bombed on February 3, 1939, but it underwent repairs in the 1990s and is in good shape now.
Desecrated — the perpetrators did not damage these buildings in any major way but did disrespect them by ending synagogue services, despoiling the interiors, and reusing them for selfish purposes, most frequently as warehouses. Example: the Tempel Synagogue in Kraków.
The rarest synagogues were the ones left alone entirely, apart from reducing their congregants. The Altneuschul, Europe’s oldest active synagogue, is a good byspel. Other rare curiosities are the few synagogues whose damages were probably unmotivated by anti-Judaism. The Luftwaffe’s bombing of British synagogues, for instance, was likely motivated more by the desire to terrorise the general public rather than the Jewish community specifically (although there is a chance that I am wrong about that).
As the title suggests, the Third Reich was by no means the only Axis power to harm synagogues. Other Axis powers did as well:
In 1942 Italian fascists ravaged the tiny sanctuary, throwing most of the ritual objects, archives, Torah scrolls, and books onto a bonfire in the main town square.
This was a purportedly unauthorized and isolated attack by the Regio Esercito, but it should be unsurprising that it happened at all.
Other synagogue wreckers included the Ustaše:
At the height of the Holocaust, during the Independent State of Croatia and the Ustasha terror, the Synagogue was torn down by the decision of the mayor of Zagreb, ostensibly because it did not fit into the city’s master plan. The demolition took place from the autumn of 1941 to the spring of 1942.
Only a few fragments of the building have been preserved: the was[h] basin and two memorial tablets from the forecourt, today in the City of Zagreb Museum, and part of a column, also from the forecourt, today in the historic seat of the Zagreb Jewish Community at 16 Palmoticeva Street.
The Iron Guard:
Iron Guardists […] ransacked 25 synagogues, 616 shops, and 547 homes.¹⁵⁰
The Banderites:
In Iavoriv (Jaworów), a small town about fifty kilometers west of Lviv, for example, [Wehrmacht] troops, together with Ukrainian militiamen who were wearing yellow-and-blue armlets, destroyed the local synagogue and humiliated, tortured, beat, murdered, and otherwise mistreated the Jews.⁷
The Vichyites:
On October 3, 1941 the French right-wing Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR) bombed six synagogues and one Jewish prayer house in Paris.
And others. Direct orders from Berlin were entirely unnecessary for these bigots to commit their acts, because the benefits of promoting homogenisation, robbing valuables, clearing land, and terrorising (potential) economic competitors were already obvious to the perpetrators. It also helped that premodern xenophobes had set precedents centuries earlier, normalizing the destruction of Jewish temples, and to this day, we can occasionally rediscover their remains.
