Synagoga v Kralupech nad Vltavou Synagogue

The Kralupy Synagogue was built in eighteen seventy-three near the railway station. It replaced an older prayer house that had served until then in house number nine in the Mikovice part of Kralupy.

It was a multipurpose building. The prayer hall was unusually located on the first floor. On the ground floor were the rabbi's apartment and classrooms of the Jewish school, where the rabbi taught himself. On the other hand, the orientation of the building from west to east is traditional. That is why the synagogue does not stand perpendicular to the street. In nineteen eighteen electricity was installed in it.

Services were held there until nineteen forty-one, when the Nazis closed the prayer houses and synagogues. The Jewish community in Kralupy ceased to exist during the Second World War. Of the one hundred and forty Jewish inhabitants of the city who were deported to concentration camps on February twenty-second, nineteen forty-two, almost nobody returned. This is commemorated by a memorial plaque for victims of the Holocaust from two thousand and five. Its author is Hvozdenský and it has the form of a broken six-pointed star, a symbol of the demise of the local Jewish community.

After the war, the city library moved into the building because its own house was destroyed by an air raid in March nineteen forty-five. The library remained there until nineteen fifty-four. The former synagogue at the same time began to serve as a prayer house for several churches. The ground floor was converted into an office and apartment for the priest. Later the building was also used as a pastry shop.

Of the original architecture, very little has been preserved to this day. This includes the shape of the windows on the second floor, which are topped with an arch at the top.