The synagogue at Zabłudów was a timber building of the seventeenth century. It burned in 1941, and what survives of it is paper: photographs held in several archives, and a set of measured drawings made by architecture students from the Warsaw University of Technology in the 1920s. A full-size frame is now being cut from those drawings at the Museum of Folk Architecture in Sanok.
This site collects what is documented about the building, the survey that recorded it, the construction it was built with, and the surviving timber architecture of the same family. Twenty-five pieces are arranged in six sections. Every one of them is written from the documentary record; where sources disagree, the piece says so.
The site is written in English throughout. Polish and Hebrew terms appear where they are the right word and are glossed the first time they are used. The masthead keeps the town’s own name.
What is here, and what is not
There is no reconstruction of the building’s interior beyond what the drawings and photographs record, and no speculative visualisation. Where the record is thin — the founding date, the painting of the ceiling, the sequence of the frame’s assembly — the pieces state the limit rather than filling it in.
Corrections and additional archive material are welcome. The contact page says how to send them.