Frontier Jews: the communities of Siberia and their architecture

This chapter discusses the question of Jewish settlement in North Asia from the early nineteenth century onward. Former criminals and their descendants turned into wealthy and proud people who looked down upon their poor brethren in the congested Pale of Jewish Settlement in the western part of the Russian Empire. Their wealth and role in Siberian life found architectural expression in the large and prominent synagogues, communal institutions and private houses that bore clear signs of their owners’ Jewishness.