An antique door window taken from a synagogue in the town of Lunna in Belarus, made of wood, from the 18th or early 19th century. The front of the window is decorated with a Star of David and beautiful ornaments in watercolors.
Lunna is a town in the Grodno region of western Belarus, where a large Jewish community existed until the Holocaust. Between the World Wars, the town had about 1,600 Jews, and there were Jewish communal activities and Hebrew schools. This activity was suspended when the area was occupied by the Soviets in September 1939. On June 28, 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, the Germans captured the town and immediately imposed various decrees on the Jews, including the requirement to wear yellow badges, restrictions on movement, and forced labor, while also committing acts of violence. In October 1941, the Jews of the town were concentrated in a closed and fenced ghetto, into which Jews from surrounding settlements were also brought. On September 2, 1942, about 1,500 Jews from the ghetto were sent to the Kalbasin camp, from which they were deported in December 1942 to Treblinka and Auschwitz.
The window was found by a local resident near the synagogue in the town, part of which was destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, and was recently brought to Israel. (In recent years, several synagogue buildings in Belarus have been put up for sale by the city of Slonim, see for example here .)
Size: 31x26 cm. Good condition.
