According
to incomplete information of the Central Statistics Committee
of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, in 1904 there
were 1,962 synagogues and Jewish houses of prayer in the
cities and towns of the Russian Empire, excluding the Kingdom
of Poland and Karsk Province (the latter now is a part of
Turkey). However, these figures do not include information
about 32 cities, including St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Riga,
where there were, of course, a number of synagogues. The
vast majority of synagogues, naturally, were located where
a large majority of Jews lived, that is in the provinces
of the “Pale of Settlement.” Thus, for example,
in Kiev Guberniia (Province) there is information about
216 synagogues and prayer houses, and in other provinces
as follows:
Volynia – 194, Vitebsk – 189, Podolia –
168, Mogilev – 161, Vilno – 139, Bessarabia
– 114, Minsk – 103, Poltava – 95, Kherson
– 92, Grodno – 68, Chernigov – 57, Kovno
– 55, Tauria – 54, Courland – 43, and
Ekaterinoslav – 31.
Among the synagogues there were many old remarkable ones,
for example, the Great Vilno Synagogue (built in 1635),
the Lutsk Synagogue (the first third of the 17th century),
the Great Vitebsk Synagogue (the early 19th century), the
Main Odessa Synagogue (1850), etc. Already in 1904 there
were synagogues, or at least prayer houses, in the majority
of the towns of the Russian hinterland (including such “purely
Russian” locations such as Rybinsk, Tambov, and Velikie
Luki) and in remote ones like Krasnoyarsk and Tomsk. In
Irkutsk Guberniia alone there were five synagogues.
The
lack of a clear distinction between “synagogues”
and “prayer houses” made an accurate count difficult,
not to mention the fact that many of them were not registered
though this was legally required, due to legal or bureaucratic
obstacles that the communities faced when they tried to
register them. For example, according to the Russian Building
Code, cities with up to thirty Jewish households could have
only a molitvennaia shkola (“prayer house,”
the Russian term used for the Hebrew beit-midrash), while
cities with between thirty and eighty Jewish households
could have a synagogue. While in the Pale of Settlement
it was sufficient to obtain permission to build a new synagogue
from the local authorities, to build one in Nizhnii Novgorod
or Kazan permission was also required from the department
of foreign (i.e. non-Russian Orthodox) religions of the
Ministry of Internal Affairs in St. Petersburg. Such permission
depended not only on fulfilling the letter of the law but
also on the fluctuations of government domestic policy regarding
its Jews. As is well known, this policy was more often hostile
than tolerant.
According
to current legislation, synagogues were not allowed to be
located close to churches nor could they be so resplendent
as to overshadow nearby Christian edifices. Thus, for example,
approval for the design and location for the building of
the St. Petersburg Choral Synagogue (opened in 1893) took
several years. The community did not receive approval for
their chosen building site in the center of the city since
it was considered too visible, while the original plan of
the synagogue had to be redrafted since it was considered
too ornate.
In Nizhnii Novgorod the authorities for a long time refused
to grant permission for the construction of the Choral Synagogue.
As a result, the Jewish community decided on a ruse. After
the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by revolutionaries
in 1881, the community requested permission from the governor-general
to construct a chapel in memory of the Tsar “as part
of a planned synagogue.” The governor felt compelled
to hand on the request to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
When Ministry officials in St. Petersburg gave permission
for the construction of the chapel, they de facto gave permission
to construct a synagogue, which was completed in 1884.
On more than one occasion assaults were made on the synagogue.
Thus, in June 1892 the new Moscow governor general, the
Grand Prince Sergei Alexandrovich ordered the Moscow Choral
Synagogue that had been finished the previous year to be
closed, its large cupola crowned with a star of David removed,
and the building either given over to another Jewish communal
institution or sold. At the same time nine of the fourteen
Jewish prayer houses in Moscow were closed. Moscow’s
Choral Synagogue was reopened only on June 1, 1906.
After
1905, when it had become easier to receive permission to
build synagogues, there was a building boom. The number
of synagogues and prayer houses increased by a factor of
one and a half in the course of five years. In 1910 in the
Russian Empire (minus the Kingdom of Poland and Karsk Province)
there were 529 officially registered synagogues and 2,240
prayer houses; a large majority, 378 or 71.5% of the synagogues
and 2,024 or 90.4% of the prayer houses, were located in
the Pale of Settlement. On the territory of present-day
Ukraine there were 1,298 synagogues and prayer houses, in
Belarus – 746, Lithuania – 271, Russia –
271, Moldova – 87, in Latvia – 73, Georgia –
17, Azerbaijan – 13, Estonia – 3, Armenia –
1, and in the republics of Central Asia – 24.
Starting in the second half of the 19th century, with the
spread of the Haskalah (enlightenment) among Jews in Russia
and the rise of a Jewish financial-industrial elite, in
the large cities large synagogue buildings began to be built
in the West European style, with two-storey halls for a
thousand worshippers or more, a women’s gallery, and,
often, a special balcony for a choir. “Choral synagogues”
were built in Odessa, Berdichev, St. Petersburg, Vilno,
Moscow, Ekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk), Elisavetgrad
(Kirovograd), Nizhnii Novgorod, Samara, Minsk, Kiev, Kharkov,
Baku, and other cities. By the beginning of World War I,
almost every large town in the Russian Empire could boast
of at least one large, imposing synagogue.
Some
scholars believe that the proliferation of large, beautiful
synagogues indicated a decline in the religiosity of a certain
part of the Jewish population which, allegedly, was interested
not in the essence of religion but in external appearances
and the prestige that accrued to luxurious synagogues. Such
edifices were filled only on major holidays because a considerable
part of the community’s members ceased attending synagogue
even on the Sabbath.
However, the vast majority of synagogues in towns or shtetlech
of the Pale of Settlement inhabited by traditional Jews
were small, often wooden structures of unimposing architecture.
Such buildings had little chance of surviving in the brutal
20th century, which did not spare the residents of those
shtetlech either.
In
the provinces of the Pale of Settlement, as a rule, synagogues
were the property of the Jewish religious communities, which
were formally disbanded in 1844, but actually continued
to exist in one form or another under the guise of religious
or philanthropic organizations. Outside the Pale, every
synagogue had an elected governing board, to which the synagogue
building belonged. Some synagogues were located in rented
premises or in the homes of private persons: these, of course,
were not property of the community.
In the large cities synagogues were not the only communal
property. Sometimes the community or Jewish public organizations
owned the premises of yeshivot, Talmud-Torahs, professional
and other schools, hospitals, welfare societies, almshouses,
orphanages, etc. Thus, for example, Odessa, Kiev, and Berdichev
had Jewish hospitals. The mutual aid association of Jewish
salesmen of Odessa had its own building, as did the local
Jewish trades school of the Trud association. In St. Petersburg
the Association for the Spread of Enlightenment among the
Jews in Russia had its vocational schools for girls and
boys located in a communal building. The St. Petersburg
Jewish orphanage and almshouse had buildings of their own.
Nevertheless, synagogues comprised the main property of
the Jewish community.
For
Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Bessarabian Jews the
synagogue was not only a place for worship. There was usually
also a beit-midrash (study hall) there. Poor yeshiva students
often slept in the synagogue. On Shabbat and holidays festive
meals took place in the synagogue. Aid to the poor was sometimes
also distributed on the synagogue premises. The community
also met there to discuss regular problems. Jews often had
no other place beside the synagogue to teach and study,
and to hold various kinds of meetings.
It is hardly surprising that, when political parties appeared
in Russia, the synagogue also began to be used for party
gatherings and political meetings, first by the Zionists
and then also by the socialists. During the revolutionary
period 1905-1907 revolutionary youth would occasionally
interrupt services, armed with sticks and revolvers, hand
out leaflets and call on worshippers to disobey the government.
On Yom Kippur in Vilno young Bundists pushed their way into
the Large Synagogue and began eating bread and drinking
beer in front of the shocked worshippers. In Odessa an anarchist
threw a grenade into a synagogue full of people since he
considered them “bourgeois.”
World
War I saw hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews driven from
their homes. Some of them were expelled from combat areas
on the unjustified grounds that they were spying for the
enemy; others fled before the onslaught of the German and
Austro-Hungarian armies. In the towns of central and eastern
Russia where refugees began to arrive, the local communities
offered them temporary shelter in their synagogues.
Since most of the Pale of Settlement was quickly occupied
by the Germans and Austrians, in 1915 the Russian government
allowed Jews to temporarily reside outside the Pale. Existing
synagogues there could not encompass all the newcomers.
Furthermore, the refugees were less assimilated and more
religious than the local Jews and, thus, wanted to pray
separately. As a result many new synagogues were built within
Russia proper.