Remah Synagogue & The Old Jewish Cemetery

Why is it significant?

Pass through the gateway into this sacred walled courtyard and feel the reverent quiet that descends upon Szeroka Street. The Remah Synagogue, built in 1557 by Israel ben Joseph, is named in honor of his son, Rabbi Moses Isserles, known across the Jewish world by the acronym Remuh.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Pass through the gateway into this sacred walled courtyard and feel the reverent quiet that descends upon Szeroka Street. The Remah Synagogue, built in 1557 by Israel ben Joseph, is named in honor of his son, Rabbi Moses Isserles, known across the Jewish world by the acronym Remuh. Isserles was one of the greatest talmudic scholars in Jewish history, author of the Mappah, the definitive commentary on the Shulchan Aruch codex of Jewish law. His rulings unified Ashkenazi Jewish religious practice for centuries, making Krakow a supreme global capital of rabbinical learning.

Step through the portal into the Old Jewish Cemetery behind the synagogue, established in 1552. Here, beneath the shade of ancient weeping willows and ash trees, stand hundreds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Renaissance and Baroque tombstones. The gravestones, carved with hands of blessing, crowns of the Torah, and rampant lions of Judah, are covered with thousands of small prayer stones left by pilgrims. Rabbi Moses Isserles's tombstone stands near the center; devout Jews from New York, Jerusalem, and London travel here every year on his yahrzeit to pray for blessings.

A legendary miracle surrounds the survival of Rabbi Isserles's grave during the Second World War. When German occupation forces systematically smashed the historic cemetery to sell the limestone for road construction, a worker attempted to break the Remuh's tomb. According to local accounts, a sudden lightning bolt struck the cemetery or the worker was instantly paralyzed by unseen forces, causing the terrified soldiers to leave the grave untouched. While surrounding tombstones were broken into fragments, the Remuh's resting place remained completely intact.

After the war, hundreds of shattered gravestone fragments were painstakingly excavated from beneath the soil where the Nazis had buried them. Conservators embedded these fragments into the interior face of the cemetery's northern stone wall, creating a haunting Krakow Wailing Wall of fractured Hebrew epitaphs. The Remah Synagogue itself remains an active orthodox sanctuary where the Sabbath is welcomed every Friday evening. It is a living sanctuary of unbroken memory spanning nearly five centuries.

Walk south along the broad, tree-lined cobblestone expanse of Szeroka Street. At the southern end stands the fortress-like brick gable of the Old Synagogue, the oldest surviving Jewish house of prayer in Poland.