Before 1939 Warsaw held one of the largest Jewish populations of any city in the world, with hundreds of prayer houses and synagogues across its districts. Of the great buildings, one alone survives: the synagogue endowed by Zalman and Rywka Nozyk and completed at the turn of the twentieth century, in a solid eclectic manner drawing on Romanesque and Byzantine forms. During the occupation it was closed and put to other uses by the German authorities, which is largely why the structure escaped demolition while the world around it was destroyed. Restored over several years in the later twentieth century, it returned to worship and now serves as the principal active synagogue of the capital, with its bimah, ark and galleries reinstated. The programme films the building as both a monument and a functioning house of prayer, and through it the continuity of a community whose history in Warsaw was almost entirely severed and then, slowly, resumed.
