The building operated as a synagogue from 1844 until 1962; had various uses during World War II and Soviet occupation; before being preserved as a Jewish history museum and cultural center since 1995.

The synagogue was built from 1841 to 1844 in a Baroque Revival style, in what was then the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, in the Austrian Empire.

[2] The building was decorated with round windows, made on elongated semicircular axes; they lit a large prayer hall and the second tiers of the women's galleries.

Despite Soviet occupation, in 1954 the Jewish community gained permission for the arrangement of the ritual mikvah bath in the synagogue.

[3] Rabbi Yaakov Gur-Aryeh served as spiritual leader from the end of World War II until his death in the early 1960s.

In 1962, after a show trial of the "speculators," the Jewish community was denied the right to have the synagogue, whose building was handed over to the sports department of the Lviv Institute of Printing.