As the Pokémon Go phenomenon grows, some institutions connected to European Jewry’s darkest hour have taken precautions against it.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum in Poland has banned the smartphone game, in which players use their device’s camera to search for animated figures that the game’s application superimposes on the video feed.
Citing the need to respect the memory of the dead, the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., also has asked visitors to refrain from playing the game, which has tens of millions of players since its release this month by Nintendo.
But in Russia, one Jewish institution with a troubled past is taking the opposite approach. In St. Petersburg, the city’s main synagogue and community center is doing its best to lure players to the building’s majestic interior by offering a bottle of kosher wine to anyone who catches a Pokémon there.
The first winner was Daniel Gurevich, a local Jewish man whose Pokémon hunt last week at the Grand Choral Synagogue of St. Petersburg was the second time he ever visited the place, according to a July 18 report by Jewish News Petersburg. Shuttered by communists in 1930 and nearly destroyed by Nazi artillery during the vicious fight for Leningrad during World War II, the synagogue was rebuilt in the 1940s but was allowed to function only as a sham shul — a prop in the Soviet Union’s propaganda about its citizens’ nonexistent freedoms.
Gurevich said he came to the synagogue after its staff posted an invitation to Pokémon hunters on Facebook, which the local media quickly reported. He was inline skating nearby when he stopped to read the news on his phone and saw the report.
“I saw that the synagogue wants me to come and look for Pokémons. Immediately I went and caught one,” he said. “It’s great that our synagogue is on the crest of fashion.”
A spokesperson for the synagogue told the news site that joining the Pokémon craze has roots in Jewish tradition.
“Any more or less knowledgeable person will tell you that the synagogue is no temple. It’s a meeting place where fun is permissible within reason, and we see this in the Purim parties and children’s games,” the spokesperson said. “We very much want the youth to know the synagogue is a modern place, not a boring one.”
Unlike some synagogues, the Choral shul complex indeed functions as much as a community center as a house of worship. Completed in 1888 after eight years of construction, it is one of Europe’s largest synagogues, and has many rooms and event halls. The synagogue’s kosher cafeteria, which offers Wi-Fi access, has many young regulars who work on laptops or meet up at cultural events.
The synagogue was closed down in 1930 for several years under orders from the Communist government. KGB agents famously used to spy on the few Jews who dared go to shul from a building opposite the synagogue.