Jewish sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a Jewish site of any kind recorded in OpenStreetMap — synagogues, but also cemeteries, Jewish schools, mikvehs, community buildings, offices and former synagogues. Just under 15,000 worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by footprint area and coloured by what kind of site it is. At the closest zooms the dot is joined by the building's mapped outline, where one has been drawn.

This is the companion to the places of worship map, which colours every religion's places of worship by religion. This one takes a single religion and shows everything of it that is mapped — and on this map, that difference matters more than on any other.

Why this map exists

Under half of the Jewish sites in OpenStreetMap are places of worship. Synagogues are 48.7% of what you see here; cemeteries alone are 39.1%.

So a map of places of worship shows less than half of mapped Jewish presence — and the half it drops is not a random half. This is the one religion where the places-of-worship map is not merely incomplete but actively misleading about what is there.

What the counts do and do not tell you

Where sites are dense, that is where they have been mapped, and mapping effort varies enormously between countries. It is not a measure of how many Jewish people live somewhere, and the ratio of synagogues to cemeteries varies just as much from one country to the next.

Read the colour before the density. A cluster of burial sites and a cluster of synagogues mean different things, and on this map more than any other they sit side by side. That is the single most important reason the map is coloured by kind of site at all.

Colour

Colour shows what kind of site it is, not which religion — the religion is the whole map. Ten kinds appear:

Place of worship — the synagogue itself. 48.7%.
Burial site — cemeteries and graveyards. 39.1%, and the reason this map is not a map of synagogues.
Religious building — the fallback, for a building the other rules did not name. 5.1%.
School — Jewish schools and yeshivas. 3.0%.
Grounds — the plot mapped as its own polygon rather than the building.
Community building — halls, centres and mikvehs.
Former site — a synagogue that is no longer one. Shown in grey, because its meaning is an absence.
Marker, office, monastery — each small; the monastery row is a single site.

The two largest kinds are given strongly distinct colours rather than shades of one, because telling a synagogue from a cemetery is what this map is for.

Mikvehs are spread across five different spellings in OpenStreetMap. Only the commonest is recognised, so the community-building count is a floor rather than a total.

Which sites count as Jewish

A site is on this map when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `jewish`, or when it is tagged `building=synagogue` — that building tag agrees with the religion tag 98.3% of the time where both are present, and recognising it recovers several hundred synagogues that carry no religion tag at all.

Branches of Judaism — Orthodox, Hasidic, Sephardic, Ashkenazi — are recorded in OpenStreetMap's `denomination` tag rather than its `religion` tag. They are shown in the details panel when you click a site, and they do not affect whether a site is on this map.

Size

Each symbol is sized by footprint area — the ground the mapped outline covers, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to footprint, so a site four times the area draws twice as wide.

85% of these sites have a mapped outline, the highest share of the religion maps, because a cemetery is nearly always drawn as an area rather than dropped as a point. The remainder are given a nominal, typical size rather than the smallest one.

Synagogues are drawn as though their footprint were twice its real size — about 1.4 times the width. This is a deliberate weighting, and the only one on the map. A synagogue is a building; a cemetery is a field. Without it the sites the map is about were consistently the smallest marks on it, beside the burial grounds and school grounds around them. The weighting is small enough to leave the real order intact.

Footprint is physical extent, not importance or congregation — and on this map it has one particular consequence: cemeteries are large. Even with the weighting above, the biggest symbols here are burial grounds covering a square kilometre, not the most significant synagogues.

Sites with no name

77% of the sites here carry a name, and the unnamed ones are shown just the same.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and a site closed or converted long ago may still be mapped until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

Back to the map