The Most Beautiful Synagogues in the World
13 places in 10 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful synagogues in the world are Dohány Street Synagogue (Hungary), Spanish Synagogue, Prague (Czech Republic) and Synagogue of El Transito (Spain). The list covers 13 synagogues in 10 countries. The Czech Republic has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Synagogue architecture never had one canonical style. A few elements stay constant, the ark holding the Torah scrolls on the wall facing Jerusalem, the bimah for reading, often a women's gallery, but around them each community borrowed the language of its place and time. That is why the finest synagogues are so varied: Mudéjar stucco in medieval Toledo, sober Dutch classicism in Amsterdam, Moorish Revival fantasies in nineteenth-century Central Europe, painted Chinese tiles in Kerala.
In Toledo, El Tránsito, built in the fourteenth century for Samuel ha-Levi, is covered in carved plaster and Hebrew inscriptions, while Santa María la Blanca is a forest of white horseshoe arches. The Spanish Synagogue in Prague glows with gilded Moorish Revival ornament, and the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest is the largest in Europe. The Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, completed in 1675 by the Sephardic community, is still lit by candles, and the Paradesi Synagogue in Kochi has a floor of hand-painted blue-and-white Chinese tiles. In Curaçao the floor of the synagogue is covered with sand.
These synagogues were chosen for how they look and ordered by beauty. Each one has its own text, a photograph with its author credited and a pin on the map; the section also divides by country.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dohány Street Synagogue | Synagogue | Hungary | |
| 2 | Spanish Synagogue, Prague | Synagogue | Czech Republic | |
| 3 | Synagogue of El Transito | Synagogue | Spain | |
| 4 | El Ghriba Synagogue | Synagogue | Tunisia | |
| 5 | Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam | Synagogue | Kingdom of the Netherlands | |
| 6 | Subotica Synagogue | Synagogue | Serbia | |
| 7 | Synagogue of Santa María la Blanca | Synagogue | Spain | |
| 8 | Paradesi Synagogue | Synagogue | India | |
| 9 | Szeged Synagogue | Synagogue | Hungary | |
| 10 | Great Synagogue of Florence | Synagogue | Italy | |
| 11 | Curaçao synagogue | Synagogue | Curaçao | |
| 12 | Jubilee Synagogue, Prague | Synagogue | Czech Republic | |
| 13 | Łańcut Synagogue | Synagogue | Poland |
01 Dohány Street Synagogue
Dohány utcai zsinagóga
Hungary · 1.7 km from Budapest47.496° N 19.061° E
Suicasmo · CC BY-SA 4.0 Budapest's great synagogue on Dohány Street is the largest in Europe and one of the largest working synagogues anywhere. It was built in 1854–1859 for the city's Neolog congregation, the reform-minded branch of Hungarian Jewry, and consecrated on 6 September 1859. The architect Ludwig Förster designed the building, and the Hungarian Frigyes Feszl shaped much of the interior. Förster deliberately reached for oriental forms, which he associated with the peoples related to the ancient Israelites, and the result became one of the defining buildings of the Moorish Revival.
Did you know? Manhattan's Central Synagogue, built in the 1870s, was modelled on the Moorish design of the Dohány Street Synagogue.
02 Spanish Synagogue, Prague
Španělská synagoga
Czech Republic · 0.4 km from Prague50.090° N 14.421° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Of the synagogues in Prague's old Jewish Town, Josefov, the Spanish Synagogue is the youngest and by far the most ornate. It stands on the site of the Altschul, the "Old School", an older synagogue that it replaced. The new building, completed in 1868 to plans by Vojtěch Ignác Ullmann and Josef Niklas, takes its name not from Spanish Jews but from its style: a Moorish Revival that looked to the Islamic architecture of medieval Spain as a fitting dress for a Jewish temple.
Did you know? František Škroup, who composed the melody of the Czech national anthem, served as organist at the earlier synagogue on this site from 1836 to 1845.
03 Synagogue of El Transito
Sinagoga del Tránsito
Spain · 1.7 km from Toledo39.856° N 4.029° W
Selbymay · CC BY-SA 3.0 From the lane outside, the Synagogue of El Tránsito is a plain block of brick and stone with a pair of small horseshoe windows over the door. Inside, a single tall hall opens up beneath a carved Mudéjar wooden ceiling, its upper walls covered in lace-like polychrome stucco: interlaced arches, foliage, coats of arms and bands of Hebrew and Arabic inscriptions. Built in the 14th century for a Jewish courtier of the King of Castile, it is one of only three synagogues built under the medieval Kingdom of Castile that still stand.
Did you know? The synagogue survived the anti-Jewish violence of 1391, when rioters attacked Toledo's Jewish quarter.
04 El Ghriba Synagogue
Tunisia33.814° N 10.859° E
Noomen9 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Behind a plain whitewashed exterior in the village of Er Riadh on the island of Djerba, the El Ghriba Synagogue opens into halls lined with ceramic tiles in blue, green, yellow, brown and white, with arches and vaults linking the rooms. It is often described as possibly the oldest synagogue in the world, and it is the most famous of the synagogues of Djerba's Jewish community.
Did you know? During the spring pilgrimage, women leave eggs inscribed with the names of unmarried young women in the synagogue's grotto, then retrieve and eat them in the hope of a wedding.
05 Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam
Portugees-Israëlietische Synagoge
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 1.8 km from Amsterdam52.367° N 4.905° E
Tadeáš Bednarz · CC BY-SA 4.0 When the Sephardi community of Amsterdam — descendants of Jews who had fled Portugal and Spain — opened its new synagogue on 2 August 1675, it was the largest synagogue in the world. The architect was Elias Bouwman, and work had begun only four years earlier, in April 1671. The building, known to its congregation as the Esnoga, a Judaeo-Spanish word, is a single tall brick hall surrounded by a ring of lower buildings, among them the Ets Haim library, founded in 1616 and housed here since the synagogue opened, today listed in UNESCO's Memory of the World register.
Did you know? The synagogue stands on wooden piles driven into Amsterdam's soft ground, and its foundation vaults can be seen by boat from the canal water beneath.
06 Subotica Synagogue
Суботичка синагога
Serbia · 3.8 km from Subotica46.102° N 19.661° E
Ванилица · CC BY-SA 4.0 Subotica, in the far north of Serbia's Vojvodina, was at the turn of the twentieth century the third-largest city of the Kingdom of Hungary, and it grew rich enough to build in the newest style of its day. Its Jewish community, some three thousand strong, commissioned a synagogue from the architects Marcell Komor and Dezső Jakab. Begun in 1901 and finished in 1902–1903, the synagogue is now counted as the only surviving place of Jewish worship in the Hungarian Art Nouveau style — the Szecesszió, which blended folk ornament with modern building.
Did you know? Komor and Jakab first drew the design for a competition to build a synagogue in Szeged; it placed second and was adapted for Subotica instead.
07 Synagogue of Santa María la Blanca
Sinagoga de Santa María la Blanca
Spain · 1.6 km from Toledo39.857° N 4.030° W
Fernando · CC BY-SA 4.0 Toledo in the Middle Ages was a city of three faiths, and this small building in its old Jewish quarter is one of the clearest traces of that mix. It was built as a synagogue for the Jewish community of the Christian kingdom of Castile, most likely around 1205 — a wooden tablet found nearby carries the date 1180, and the exact year is still argued over. A probable patron is Joseph ben Meir ben Shoshan, whose father handled the finances of King Alfonso VIII and whose epitaph records that he built a synagogue. The builders were Jewish, the craftsmen worked in the Mudéjar manner, and the form they chose was borrowed from Almohad mosques rather than from any synagogue tradition.
Did you know? It is one of only three medieval synagogues in Spain built by Jews in the Mudéjar style that still stand.
08 Paradesi Synagogue
India · 7.8 km from Kochi9.957° N 76.259° E
Vis M · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Paradesi Synagogue stands at the end of a narrow street in Mattancherry, the old trading quarter of Kochi on the coast of Kerala, in the area still called Jew Town. It was built in 1568 by Samuel Castiel, David Belila and Joseph Levi for the Paradesi — "foreign" — Jews, Sephardi and other newcomers who had joined the far older Jewish community of the Malabar coast. The land was granted by the Raja of Cochin, right beside his palace in Mattancherry. It is the oldest synagogue in the Commonwealth still in use.
Did you know? No two of the hand-painted Chinese floor tiles are identical, with motifs including willows, peonies, lotuses and plum blossoms.
09 Szeged Synagogue
Szegedi zsinagóga
Hungary · 0.7 km from Szeged46.254° N 20.143° E
Somorjai Ferenc · CC BY-SA 3.0 Szeged, the lively university city on the Tisza in southern Hungary, was largely rebuilt after the great flood of 1879, and its Jewish community marked that new era with one of the most beautiful synagogues of the Art Nouveau age. Lipót Baumhorn, the most prolific synagogue architect of Austria-Hungary, won the design competition in 1897 and later counted Szeged as his finest work; the building went up between 1900 and 1903. With 1,300 seats it is the second-largest synagogue in Hungary after Dohány Street in Budapest.
Did you know? The stained-glass windows, devised with Rabbi Immánuel Lőw, portray the Jewish festivals using only plants and ritual objects, with no human figures at all.
10 Great Synagogue of Florence
Sinagoga di Firenze
Italy · 1.5 km from Florence43.773° N 11.266° E
דני · CC BY-SA 2.5 Florence's Jewish community gained full civic rights in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1848, and a generation later it built a synagogue meant to be seen from anywhere in the city. The money came from the will of David Levi, president of the Jewish community, who left funds for a new synagogue "worthy of the city". Three architects — Mariano Falcini, Vincenzo Micheli and the Jewish architect Marco Treves — began work in 1874 and finished in 1882. The result, on Via Luigi Carlo Farini, is one of the finest synagogues of the emancipation era in Europe.
Did you know? The Moorish Revival style was chosen partly because it was never used for churches and recalled the Jewish heritage of medieval Spain.
11 Curaçao synagogue
Curaçao · 6.6 km from Willemstad12.105° N 68.933° W
Image by falco from Pixabay Step through a quiet courtyard in the old merchant quarter of Willemstad and the floor of the prayer hall turns out to be covered not in stone or wood but in loose white sand. The Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue, known on the island simply as the Snoa, was completed in 1732 and is the oldest synagogue in the Americas still standing, as well as home to one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the Western Hemisphere.
Did you know? Only four synagogues still keep the Dutch-Portuguese sand floor: those in Willemstad, Kingston in Jamaica, Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands and Paramaribo in Suriname.
12 Jubilee Synagogue, Prague
Jeruzalémská synagoga
Czech Republic · 0.7 km from Prague50.085° N 14.432° E
Image by Laura_Maxim from Pixabay The Jubilee Synagogue is the most colourful building in Prague's New Town, and one of the most unexpected. Its west-facing facade on Jeruzalémská street is a burst of Moorish Revival fantasy - horseshoe arches, bands of red and white masonry in the Mudéjar manner, two towers flanking the entrance and a great rose window set with a Star of David - handled with the flowing ornament of Art Nouveau. Wedged into an ordinary street not far from the main railway station, it stops passers-by who have no idea it is there.
Did you know? Today it is the largest synagogue in Prague, with seats for about 850 worshippers.
13 Łańcut Synagogue
Synagoga w Łańcucie
Poland · 17.4 km from Rzeszów50.068° N 22.232° E
Image by Jarosik99 from Pixabay Behind a plain Baroque exterior, the former synagogue of Łańcut holds one of the most richly painted Jewish interiors to survive in Poland. Four massive pillars in the centre of the nearly square hall support the vaults and enclose the bimah, crowned by a small cupola, and every surface around it is covered with painted stucco, Hebrew inscriptions, zodiac signs, biblical scenes and animals.
Did you know? By 1884 about 1,400 Jews lived in Łańcut, roughly 40 percent of the town's population.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful synagogue in the world?
- On our list, Dohány Street Synagogue (Hungary) ranks first, followed by Spanish Synagogue, Prague (Czech Republic) and Synagogue of El Transito (Spain).
- What is the largest synagogue in Europe?
- The Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest, a Moorish Revival building completed in the mid-nineteenth century, is the largest synagogue in Europe.
- Why does the synagogue in Curaçao have a sand floor?
- The sand floor of Mikvé Israel-Emanuel is traditionally explained as a reminder of the Israelites' forty years in the desert, or of crypto-Jews in Iberia who muffled the sound of their prayers.
- Which country has the most beautiful synagogues?
- In our collection, the most come from the Czech Republic (2), Hungary (2) and Spain (2).
- How many synagogues are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 13 synagogues in 10 countries. The Czech Republic has the most, with 2.