Jewish sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a Jewish site of any kind: a synagogue, but also a cemetery, a school, a mikveh, a community building, an office or a former synagogue. There are more than 14,000 worldwide. Colour represents which kind of site it is, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the site. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as the branch of Judaism and the website. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every site here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any register of synagogues or Jewish institutions.

What we include

A site is here when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `jewish`, or when the building is tagged `building=synagogue`. The building tag agrees with the religion tag almost every time both are present, and reading it as well recovers several hundred synagogues that record no religion at all.

About half of what results is places of worship and about two in five is burial ground, so this is as much a map of cemeteries as of synagogues. Branches of Judaism such as Orthodox, Hasidic and Sephardic sit in a separate `denomination` tag. We show that when you click a site, and we don't use it to decide what goes on the map. Mikvehs are spelled five different ways in OpenStreetMap and we recognise only the commonest, so the community-building count is lower than the truth.

Colour

Colour represents the kind of site rather than the religion, because the religion is the whole map. Ten kinds appear, and the two largest, places of worship and burial sites, take strongly different colours rather than two shades of one. Telling a synagogue from a cemetery is what this map is for. The smaller kinds are grounds mapped as their own plot, schools, community buildings, offices, markers and a single monastery.

Former synagogues

One class stands for an absence rather than a presence. A former site is a building that OpenStreetMap records as having been a synagogue and no longer being one, whether it now stands empty, serves another use or belongs to another religion. We draw those in grey so that you can tell them from a working synagogue.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the site in square metres. About 85% of these sites are drawn as an outline, which is a high share, because a cemetery is nearly always traced as an area rather than dropped as a point. We draw the rest at one nominal size.

We also draw synagogues as though their footprint were twice its real size, which makes them about 1.4 times as wide. A synagogue is a building and a cemetery is a field, and without that weighting the buildings this map is about were the smallest marks on it. Even with it, the largest dots are burial grounds covering a square kilometre rather than the best known synagogues.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a Jewish site there, not that none is there. Mapping is more thorough in western and central Europe and in North America than across much of Africa, central Asia and South America. A synagogue that closed before anyone recorded it is not here at all.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A site shown here may have closed or changed hands, and a building often stands for years after it stops being used.

Source and licence

Back to the map