Join us on 25 February 2025!
We are pleased to invite you to a special event focused on the Great Synagogue in Orla, Poland, a historic temple founded in the second half of the 17th century. For over 200 years, the synagogue occupied a central place in the life of Orla and its Jewish community. The synagogue was frequently embellished, resulting in a captivating interior that blended Baroque and Renaissance influences, and the striking Classical façade built in the 19th century, which has survived to this day.
However, the history of the syangogue took a tragic turn in the spring of 1942, when the Jewish community was forcibly relocated to a ghetto and subsequently deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. This tragic episode marked the beginning of the synagogue’s decline, which was used as a warehouse in the following years and lost much of its original splendor, including its frescoes and cherished Torah ark. Since the 1980s, the synagogue has undergone some minor interventions, but no major restoration has taken place due to financial constraints.
Our guest speakers, Piotr Puchta, director of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODŻ), and Krzysztof Bielawski, researcher and project coordinator at FODŻ, will explain the long and still ongoing journey of the Polish foundation that today owns the building to restore it to its former splendour and transform the Orla Synagogue into a lively space that serves the local community once again.
This will be the second webinar of a series of FRH Talks dedicated to ambitious initiatives and resilient solutions to save endangered religious heritage sites. The three heritage sites presented in these webinars are all shortlisted in the 7 Most Endangered Programme 2025.
Join us on Tuesday 25 February and contribute to the conversation about the safeguarding of our endangered religious heritage treasures.
Speakers
Krzysztof Bielawski
Krzysztof Bielawski is a Jewish cemetery and heritage researcher, project coordinator at the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (www.fodz.pl), and a PhD student at University of Warsaw (Jewish Studies). From 2009 to 2024, Bielawski served as a Jewish heritage specialist at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Krzysztof Bielawski has authored various articles on Jewish cemeteries, funeral customs, and Jewish life in Poland after 1944 plus two books: Zagłada cmentarzy żydowskich (Warsaw 2020) and The Destruction of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland (Boston 2024).
Piotr Puchta
Piotr Puchta is director at the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland. He is a former Polish diplomat and activist who led the Polish delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2014-2016. After retiring from diplomatic service, in March 2019 he joined the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage. The Foundation’s primary mission is to protect and commemorate surviving heritage sites, including cemeteries and synagogues, as well as other objects of Jewish cultural heritage.
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