Bačka Topola Synagogue

OVERVIEW

The story of Bačka Topola Synagogue

Bačka Topola, called Topolya in Hungarian, is a market town in the North Bačka district of Vojvodina, about 30 kilometres south of Subotica. JewishGen's Cemetery Discovery Project, citing the Encyclopedia of Jewish Life, dates its Jewish community to 1770, and the Jewish cemetery, which Terzić and Bjeljac date to 1835, still holds about 300 gravestones from 1854 to 1939. The synagogue was built in 1863. Nothing has been found about its builder, plan or appearance, and no photograph of it has been identified.

In the early twentieth century the community added a rabbinate building in an oriental, Moorish-inspired style, with a Star of David in a roundel above its entrance; the Cemetery Discovery Project dates it to 1920. The rabbinate held a small winter synagogue for weekday and cold-season prayer, and the main synagogue stood next to it. The community was destroyed in the Holocaust, and Terzić and Bjeljac list the synagogue as demolished in 1950. A regional tourism page says instead that it was destroyed by fire. The rabbinate building survives and houses the town's library, and the cemetery and its mortuary also remain.

LOCATION

Where it stood for 87 years

Historic: Topolya (Bácstopolya), Bács-Bodrog county, beside the Jewish rabbinate building in the town centre; exact plot unknown. Today: next to the town library (former rabbinate), Glavna 16, 24300 Bačka Topola, Serbia (approximate).

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The Jewish community

Very little about the Jewish community of Bačka Topola has been found in the sources read. The Cemetery Discovery Project gives 1770 as the date from which a community existed, citing the Encyclopedia of Jewish Life (2001). Terzić and Bjeljac, in their inventory of Jewish heritage in Bačka, give 1835 for the Jewish cemetery, and the European Jewish cemetery survey (ESJF) recorded about 300 gravestones there, the oldest from 1854 and the newest from 1939, with a brick mortuary decorated with Stars of David. The community was large and settled enough to build a synagogue in 1863 and, in the early twentieth century, a separate rabbinate building in the town centre, in which a small winter synagogue was fitted out. These buildings suggest an organised congregation with its own rabbi into the interwar years, but no rabbi, cantor or community officer has been identified by name, no population figures for the town's Jews were found, and the congregation's religious orientation (Orthodox, Neolog or Status Quo) is unknown.

Architecture and design

No description, plan or photograph of the Bačka Topola synagogue has been found, so its form is unknown. The only firm facts are its date, 1863, given in the Cemetery Discovery Project and in Terzić and Bjeljac's table of Bačka synagogues, and its position next to the community's rabbinate building, recorded by the tourist board of Vojvodina. That neighbouring building, which still stands, was put up at the beginning of the twentieth century; the tourist board describes it as Moorish in style, and the Cemetery Discovery Project notes a Star of David in a roundel above its main entrance and dates it to 1920. Inside it, according to Robert Čoban writing in Vreme in 2023, was a small winter synagogue, a heated prayer room used when the main hall was too cold or too large for the number of worshippers. Whether the 1863 synagogue was itself remodelled when the rabbinate was built is not recorded. Its architect, builder, capacity, materials and interior arrangement are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

No account of services, rabbis or cantors at the Bačka Topola synagogue has been found in the sources read, so the life of the congregation can only be outlined from its buildings. The community kept a synagogue from 1863, and in the early twentieth century built a rabbinate beside it, which implies that it employed its own rabbi and kept his office and home next to the place of worship. The small winter synagogue inside the rabbinate, described by Robert Čoban in Vreme, would have served for weekday prayer and for winter services, when heating the main hall was impractical. The community also maintained its own cemetery with a mortuary for ritual washing of the dead, in use from the 1830s or 1850s until the last recorded burial of 1939. Whether the congregation ran a school, a burial society or charitable associations, and to which branch of Hungarian Jewry it belonged, is unknown and would need the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon, Pinkas Hakehillot or local archives to establish.

Destruction

Bačka was annexed by Hungary in 1941, and Terzić and Bjeljac write that the Hungarian military destroyed Jewish heritage there, synagogues included, during the occupation; no source read says whether the Bačka Topola synagogue was damaged in those years. After the deportation of 1944 it stood without a congregation. Terzić and Bjeljac give 1950 as the year it was demolished, and the Cemetery Discovery Project likewise says it was demolished in 1950; the English-language Wikipedia list of Serbian synagogues, based on Goran Levi's catalogue, says only that it was demolished after 1945. This places the end of the building in the first years of Communist Yugoslavia, when, according to Terzić and Bjeljac, most of Vojvodina's synagogues were demolished, between 1948 and 1962, by the Communist authorities. None of the sources read names who ordered or carried out the demolition at Bačka Topola, or whether the building was first sold. The tourist board of Vojvodina states instead that the synagogue was destroyed by fire, without a date; this account could not be reconciled with the others. Stone tablets from the synagogue were later kept by the Jewish community of Subotica.

The community’s fate

In April 1941 Bačka was occupied and annexed by Hungary. Terzić and Bjeljac describe the anti-Jewish measures that followed in the region: laws barring Jews from education and employment, internment of many in camps, forced labour in camps for all adult Jews, and the yellow star. In 1944 the Jews of Bačka were deported, most of them to Auschwitz, where the great majority were murdered. Terzić and Bjeljac count 7,934 Jews from the region who died in camps and state that only 3,572 Jews, 18.7 per cent, survived the war; after it only about 4,000 returned to Vojvodina, and many of the survivors emigrated to Israel from 1948. How many Jews lived in Bačka Topola in 1941, when exactly they were deported and how many survived are unknown from the sources read. No functioning congregation is recorded in the town after the war, and the Holocaust memorial plaque now fixed in the cemetery wall is one of the few signs of the community that remains.

The site today

The synagogue site has not been located exactly. The tourist board of Vojvodina states that the synagogue stood next to the former rabbinate, the early twentieth-century building with a Star of David over its door that now houses the town library, Biblioteka Eržebet Juhas, on Glavna (Main) Street in the centre of Bačka Topola; OpenStreetMap places the library at Glavna 16. Which side of the library the synagogue stood on, and what now occupies its plot, is unknown. The Jewish cemetery on Široka Street, with its mortuary and about 300 gravestones, survives behind a brick wall and is kept by the local community. A Holocaust memorial plaque is set into the cemetery fence.

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