Euroasian Jewish News

The ''Square of Three Synagogues" Project

Project of Reconstruction of Jewish Buildings Discussed in Lviv

On October 27, the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress (EAJC) General Council Chairman spoke at the expert and community discussions of an architectural project that received first prize at the December 2010 competition. This is the so-called "Square of Three Synagogues," stationed in the middle of Lviv's Jewish block, where the Nazis blew up three Jewish buildings during the Holocaust, including the legendary "Golden Rose" synagogue, the Big Synagogue, and the Beith Ha-Midrash. The authors of the winning project are the German landscape architects Franz Reshke, Paul Reshke, and Frederik Springer.

In his speeches, as last year, drew the attention of the gathering to very important circumstances hindering the implementation of the project. This is because the project under consideration - as all others proposed - accounted first and foremost for architectural goals, and paid much less attention to the historic, national, and religious aspects of this part of Lviv. This led to significant resistance from several representatives of Lviv's architects, and, above all, from the Jewish community. Josef Zisels proposed a compromise in strengthening and deepining the architectural meaning of the projects, thus solving the forementioned problems in its implementation.

The hearing and discussion of the projects, as last year's competition, were organized by the Lviv City Hall and the Ukrainian-German project "Municipal Development and Restoration of Old Lviv" with the support of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress and the Congress of National Communities of Ukraine.