Tallinn Synagogue, (), also known as Beit Bella Synagogue, is located in
Tallinn
Tallinn is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Estonia, most populous city of Estonia. Situated on a Tallinn Bay, bay in north Estonia, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland of the Baltic Sea, it has a population of (as of 2025) and ...
,
Estonia
Estonia, officially the Republic of Estonia, is a country in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, and to the east by Ru ...
.
The privately funded synagogue in central Tallinn was inaugurated on May 16, 2007. The building is an
ultramodern
Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were all aspects of this moveme ...
, airy structure, which can seat 180 people with additional seating for up to 230 people for concerts and other public events. It received global attention as it was the first synagogue to open in Estonia since
World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
.
Other synagogues in Estonia
The original
Great Synagogue of Tallinn
The Great Synagogue of Tallinn () was an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, that was located in Maakri Street, Tallinn, Estonia. Nowadays, the Jews are using Tallinn Synagogue.
The synagogue was built in 1884, and it was designed by .
The bombing of Ta ...
, built in 1883, was not rebuilt after being destroyed in March 1944 during a
Soviet air bombing raid on Tallinn, which at the time was occupied by
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German Reich, German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a Totalit ...
- the city then became the only post-war
Europe
Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...
an capital without a synagogue. The
Tartu Synagogue, located in
Tartu
Tartu is the second largest city in Estonia after Tallinn. Tartu has a population of 97,759 (as of 2024). It is southeast of Tallinn and 245 kilometres (152 miles) northeast of Riga, Latvia. Tartu lies on the Emajõgi river, which connects the ...
, a university city in southeastern Estonia and the second largest city in Estonia, was also destroyed during World War II.
See also
*
History of the Jews in Estonia
The history of Jews in Estonia starts with reports of the presence of individual Jews in what is now Estonia from as early as the 14th century.
Jews were settled in Estonia in the 19th century, especially following a statute of Russian Tsar ...
*
The Holocaust in Estonia
By the end of 1941, virtually all of the 950 to 1,000 Estonian Jews unable to escape Estonia before its occupation by Nazi Germany (25% of the total prewar Jewish population) were killed in the Holocaust by German units such as ''Einsatzgruppe ...
References
External links
*
{{Jews and Judaism in Estonia
2007 establishments in Estonia
21st-century synagogues in Europe
Modernist synagogues
Orthodox synagogues in Europe
Religious buildings and structures in Tallinn
Synagogues completed in 2007
Synagogues in Estonia