DURING the eighteenth century a unique type of wooden synagogue was built in the medium-sized towns of eastern Europe. Their style was characterized chiefly by a raised wooden ceiling or dome contained within a traditional east European timber roof structure. Although the buildings, along with their communities, were almost completely destroyed by the Nazis, the surviving documentation on the wooden synagogues provides a significant source for interpreting the popular culture of east European Jewry before the advent of modern reform and social movements, and before the rise of hasidism.

Wooden synagogues have been publicized through scholarly, popular, and photographic sources, and the architecture has been analysed for over a century. In the fifty-year period prior to their destruction in the Second World War, considerable primary documentation was compiled, a significant amount of which survived the war and is now located in east European, Israeli, and newly accessible former Soviet archives. The emergence of the interior-domed synagogue can be dated and subdivided into three historical stages: a gradual, trial-and-error introduction beginning at the end of the seventeenth and in the early eighteenth centuries, a rapid spread throughout the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth during the eighteenth century, and a discontinuation of the fully developed form at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Although this article concentrates on the wooden, interior-domed type, it is important to emphasize that there were other forms of the east European synagogue. The complete history of synagogue construction in this region includes many types of wooden and masonry structure, extending over an 800-year period and encompassing millions of Jews in hundreds of cities and towns spread across an enormous area more than double the size of the present Ukraine. The map (Fig. 1) shows the furthest extent of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth where domed wooden synagogues were constructed. Although integrally related to other types and styles of synagogue, for example the single-vault masonry synagogues from the larger towns, the wooden, interior-domed type achieved a broad unity of similar structures over a wide area during the eighteenth century.