Izbica's last hanging sukkah saved from demolition

In the years before the war, when the Days of Awe arrived and the east wind began to blow through the alleyways of Izbica, that mud-deep, thought-heavy shtetl in the heart of Poland, the wooden beams in the walls would begin to groan from the cold. Izbica was a town of chassidim, a place where a man's thoughts did not walk at ease as in other places, but entered inward and deeper still, to a depth without end.

And just as the Torah of Izbica was not laid upon the secure ground of routine, so too its sukkahs did not stand upon the earth.

The houses were crowded side by side, their courtyards too narrow to contain. So the Jews of the town took iron beams and drove them into the high plaster walls, and between them they hung square wooden boxes, "kuczkas" they called them in Polish, suspended between heaven and earth, hanging on nothing above the stone alleyways. And anyone who passed there in those hours between the suns, and saw these wooden cells hanging like birds' nests over the abyss, would be reminded on his own of that deep teaching planted there by the Rebbe of Izbica, the Mei HaShiloach zt"l: that a man has no standing or strength of his own at all, and hangs at every moment by a hair's breadth on the simple will of the Creator, blessed be He, and has no support but His providence alone.

And so, when the night of the chag came, the householders would climb up to those hanging boxes. The fur coat thick, the air burning the tip of the nose, and the candle flickering in its cup of oil against the narrow windows.

Architecture of ahavas hamitzvah

A thick rope would dangle from the roof beam, with an old iron pulley. The autumn rains would pour down, the chassid would pull on the rope, and the slanted tin roof would descend with a creak and cover over his head. The rain would stop and the clouds would tear open a window of grey sky, immediately he would raise the cover upward, and the s'chach made of damp pine branches would be revealed again, bringing into the small balcony the scent of the dark forests surrounding the town.

And there, inside that sukkah from Izbica, a man's sitting was both wondrous and exalted. Outside, the East European cold whistling, the darkness covering the tile roofs, and beneath his feet nothing but thin planks shaking from every slight movement. And inside, warmth from above. A wooden table covered with a white cloth, a silver box with a green esrog resting among cotton wool, and white paper cutouts that the children had made swaying slowly in the wind entering through the cracks.

Is there any place that better illustrates "tzila d'mehemnusa"? For the entire matter of that famous teaching from Izbica is nothing but this: to strip from man the illusion of his own strength, to seat him within shaky walls that have no foundation in the earth, and to gaze from within them toward the heavens above with complete knowledge that "all is in the hands of Heaven."

A town that was entirely Jewish: the architectural wonder on the roadside

This description is not a product of imagination. In the heart of the Lublin region, on the road leading north from Zamosc, lies the town of Izbica. Until the outbreak of the Second World War, Izbica was an exceptional phenomenon in the Polish landscape: a quintessential shtetl in which more than ninety percent of the residents were Torah-observant Jews. Its streets were not built of stone palaces, but of rows of one- or two-story wooden and plaster houses, crowded and hunched, leaning one on the back of the other along the main road and the nearby hills.

Because of that famous crowding, there was no room in the courtyards to erect spacious sukkahs. The Jews of the town developed the expertise of the "kuczka" — roofed wooden balconies built as a protrusion from the upper floor of the house, supported by slanted wooden beams or iron brackets firmly anchored into the bearing wall.

A street in the Izbica ghetto during the period when transports arrived from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Photo: Max Kirnberger, communications officer in the Wehrmacht (Photo: Fernmeldetruppe)

For decades, the sukkah in Izbica was considered an inseparable part of the landscape of the Polish-Jewish home. The non-Jewish residents of the place called the entire holiday by the name of the balcony, Święto Kuczki (the Festival of Sukkahs). They knew well the annual sight of their Jewish neighbors climbing on erev chag, dragging green pine branches and adjusting the system of ropes and weights that would allow quick opening of the roof at any moment when the skies would clear.

During the Shoah, the Nazis turned Izbica into a central transit ghetto. Tens of thousands of Jews from all over Poland and Europe were concentrated in its narrow alleyways on their final journey to the Sobibor and Belzec death camps, and the magnificent kehillah was utterly destroyed. The wooden houses were emptied of their inhabitants, but remnants of those wooden boxes continued to stand on the facades as silent witnesses to lives cut down.

Only two historic wooden sukkahs survived in the town, and one of them faced imminent destruction (Photo: Courtesy of the photographer)

At the last moment: the rescue operation for the abandoned sukkah

In recent years, the term "Jewish architecture" has become a subject of growing interest in Poland, particularly in the small towns where isolated remnants of the destroyed material culture remain. This reality reached a dramatic test point recently in Izbica: only two historic wooden sukkahs survived in the town, and one of them faced immediate danger of destruction after the building on which it hung was slated for complete demolition.

The certain loss of the sukkah led to widespread mobilization. Thanks to the project's initiators and local residents, a complex operation was launched in which the sukkah was carefully dismantled, board by board, and rescued from destruction under the bulldozer's blades.

Since 2022, activity around the rescue of the sukkah has been conducted through close cooperation between two main organizations: the Zapomniane Foundation (led by Agnieszka Nieradko, Aleksandra Janus and Iwona Charmon) and the Formy Wspólne Foundation (led by Piotr Michalowicz, Lukasz Mieszkowski and Marcin Urbanek).

The rescue and documentation process drew wide circles. Participating in the process are local Izbica residents — adults preserving memories of the past, alongside children from the local school being exposed for the first time to the world of their pre-war neighbors, the city administration, heritage researchers, artists and social activists.

The activity included communication and in-depth discussions with property owners, a professional meeting with senior researcher Dr. Malgorzata Michalska-Nakonieczna who specializes in preserving Jewish space in Lublin, working meetings with the mayor of Izbica, and the engineering dismantling operation in the field that extracted the wooden structure from the building condemned to demolition.

The roof that will open again — as a living memorial

The dismantled sukkah is now undergoing a professional and meticulous preservation process, after which it is destined to return to Izbica and be installed there anew, this time not as a temporary storage on a peeling wall, but as a public memorial monument to the Jewish community that lived and created in the town for hundreds of years.

At the center of the memorial will stand that unique mechanism: the opening roof of the sukkah. The historic device, which once allowed the chassidim of Izbica to peek toward the heights of heaven from inside the hanging wooden box, will become a tangible symbol of the town's soul. That creak of the old pulley, which once raised the s'chach under the dome of heaven before the yom tov evening meal, will remain engraved in the Polish landscape as eternal testimony to the power of faith hanging on nothing.