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More than 3,000 synagogues dot Europe’s countryside and cities. Many are abandoned. The Jews who used them were murdered or emigrated. Some lie in ruins; others have been transformed into cafés, sports halls, shops, and even a saloon, in one case.
Yet, the solution is not to rebuild and reconstruct every ruin, according to a panel of experts assembled for the European Union for Progressive Judaism’s latest webinar.
In his 1978 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer employed memories from his earliest years as a source of hope for coping with the troubles of modern times:
“In our home and in many other homes the eternal questions were more actual than the latest news in the Yiddish newspaper,” he said. “In spite of all the disenchantments and all my skepticism I believe that the nations can learn much from those Jews, their way of thinking, their way of bringing up children, their finding happiness where others see nothing but misery and humiliation.”
As a teenager, in the midst of the First World War, Singer moved with his siblings and his mother to her hometown, the small shtetl of Biłgoraj, where they belonged to a prominent rabbinical family.