Central Synagogue is hosting public tours and an exhibition on Nazi-looted belongings this weekend

You can spend years recognizing a New York building without knowing much about what happens inside. This Sunday, Central Synagogue offers a reason to get better acquainted with the landmark at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street—and to head downstairs after admiring the sanctuary.

On Sunday, October 18, from noon to 4pm, the synagogue will welcome visitors for Open House New York, with docent-led mini-tours exploring its architecture and the congregation’s history. Visitors can join multiple tours and visit the lower-level exhibition, which examines the work of tracing objects taken from Jewish families during World War II.

The building makes a persuasive case for looking up. Designed by Jewish architect Henry Fernbach, Central’s Moorish Revival exterior draws on Budapest’s Dohány Street Synagogue. Its paired towers and contrasting bands of sandstone give the Lexington Avenue façade an architectural vocabulary quite different from the office buildings around it. Inside, slender cast-iron columns divide the sanctuary into a central nave and side aisles, with galleries above. The original ark remains on the bimah, its carved decoration picked out in gold beneath blue onion domes. Those are details worth having someone explain while you’re standing in front of them.

Downstairs, the questions shift from how a building was designed to how an object’s history can be reconstructed. The exhibition, “Holocaust Provenance: In Search of What Was Lost,” examines the histories of belongings looted from Jewish families. Central’s description extends beyond paintings to furniture and books, placing domestic possessions within the larger account of cultural theft. The subject is provenance research: establishing where something came from and tracing the people through whose hands it passed.

That work continues well beyond an exhibition wall. On Monday, October 19, Central will host a separate panel about Nazi looting and restitution, moderated by Rabbi Sarah Berman. The announced speakers include attorneys Kate Aufses and Yaél Weitz, who have represented claimants seeking the return of art taken during the Holocaust, alongside provenance researcher Emily Selter and Art Ashes founder Joel Greenberg. The conversation will cover ongoing and recent restitution cases, giving visitors interested in the exhibition a way to pursue its legal and historical questions the following evening.

Sunday’s opening is also useful for anyone whose weekday schedule has kept them from visiting. Central ordinarily offers public sanctuary viewing on Wednesdays from 12:30pm to 2pm; this weekend provides a four-hour Sunday window for exploring the building.