Bácsalmás Synagogue

The Jewish community

According to the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon the community was founded between 1750 and 1760; its founding documents were lost in the great fire of 1850. The founders named are Mendel Beck, ancestor of the Beck family of Madaras, Izsák Krábl, who came from Moravia, B. Wolf Reich, Mandel Rosenberg of Tataháza and Moyses Roth. A Chevra Kadisha was set up in 1773 and an elementary school in 1846, teaching in Hungarian from 1869. The congregation organised itself on a status quo ante basis, joining neither the Neolog nor the Orthodox organisation. Anikó Gazda's gazetteer gives 81 Jews in 1828, 217 in 1910 and 186 in 1941. In 1929 the lexicon counted 52 families, 186 people and 58 taxpayers in a town of about 10,000, and noted that they were Hungarian-speaking although other nationalities formed the majority. Members included 26 shopkeepers, a wholesaler, a mill owner, a landowner, three lawyers, three doctors and an engineer. Forty men served in the First World War; seven fell and two died of wounds at home. The registry district took in Bajmok, Madaras, Katymár, Tataháza, Mátételke and Kunbaja.

Architecture and design

No architect, builder, plan or seating figure has been found. The lexicon of 1929 says only that the congregation built a columned, ornate temple in 1888. The two museum photographs dated 1958 are the best evidence. They show a free-standing hall of exposed brick under a pitched roof. The entrance front is a plain gable flanked by two square corner turrets with corbelled brick tops and stepped caps, each carrying a Star of David. A stepped brick frieze climbs the gable, a round window sits at its centre, and the doorway below has a rendered surround with a curved pediment. The side wall has round-arched windows and a small circular one. A wall with brick piers and iron railings closed the yard from the street. Inside, the ark wall was arched and plastered, with pilaster capitals bearing Stars of David. The marble ark had four slender columns, the Hebrew word kadosh (holy) on its cornice, and a shaped gable around a round window; above it hung plaster drapery and the Tablets of the Law. The ceiling was painted. The style label is our reading of the photographs, not a documented attribution.

Life inside the synagogue

The congregation followed the status quo ante rite and, as far as the sources read show, had no rabbi of its own: the lexicon of 1929 lists lay officers and a teacher, but no rabbi or cantor by name. Its institutions were considerable for some fifty families. Besides the synagogue it kept a ritual bath and a matzah bakery with modern equipment, a Talmud Torah, and a Hebrew course started in 1906 within the elementary school. The school was the community's pride: in 1900, under the presidency of Lipót Grauaug, it received a handsome two-storey building, and in 1929 it had 21 pupils and one teacher, the headmaster Salamon Gross, who also served as the community's notary. The budget for 1927-28 was 10,000 pengő, spent on worship, charity and welfare. A synagogue warden (templomgondnok), the landowner Miksa Krahl, looked after the building, and the burial society was chaired by the wholesaler Bernát Ripp. In the last years the schoolteacher Dezső Nussbaum also taught Jewish religion at the town's boys' civic school.

Destruction

No source read records damage to the synagogue during the war. In 1944 the quarter around it was fenced in as a ghetto, and its congregation was deported. Survivors who came home repaired the building and placed in it five marble tablets naming 168 victims, but according to Ernő Polgár too few men remained for a prayer quorum, and the Jews left the town in the 1950s. The synagogue was then sold; neither seller nor buyer is named. A bricklayers' brigade from the neighbouring village of Mélykút took it down, and a former headmaster of the Bácsalmás grammar school, Mihály Németh, remembered hundreds of carts hauling the bricks away. The Catholic church directory entry for Mélykút confirms that the Szent Erzsébet church, built in 1959-61, used brick from the demolished Bácsalmás synagogue. The date is disputed: Ernő Polgár gives 1950 and Wikipedia 1954, but the museum photographs of the standing, stripped building are dated 1958, which fits the church's building dates. This happened under Communist rule, but no source read says that a council or state body ordered it.

The community’s fate

After the Nazi German occupation of March 1944 the local Jews were first shut into a house at the corner of Kossuth and Holló streets, then into a ghetto formed around the synagogue and the Jewish school. In mid-June Bácsalmás was made one of the collection camps of deportation zone IV in place of Szabadka. Jews were brought from Baja, Szabadka, Jánoshalma, Mélykút and some twenty villages; Braham records 2,793 people there, while local estimates run far higher. They were crowded into houses, lofts and barns, more than 500 in the Krahl family's house and outbuildings alone. Hungarian gendarmes guarded them at first, then the Nazi German SS, whose headquarters was the boys' civic school, and finally a gendarme unit from Újvidék. Jakab Stein, a mill owner, died after a beating. Men born between 1895 and 1925 were taken for forced labour in early June. The rest were marched to the station and deported on 25-26 June 1944, most to Auschwitz; some wagons were diverted to Strasshof in Austria. The memorial tablets list 168 dead from Bácsalmás. About twenty-five named survivors returned, nearly all the men from forced labour.

The site today

The exact plot of the synagogue has not been identified in the sources read, so what stands on it today is Unknown. It stood in the same quarter as the Jewish school, whose building survives on Korona utca and is listed among the town's sights. The map pin for this entry marks that school building and is only an approximation of the synagogue's position. OpenStreetMap records a Holocaust memorial plaque on the school, and the five marble tablets from the synagogue now stand at the memorial in the courtyard of the Baja synagogue. The Jewish cemetery and its mortuary survive in Bácsalmás. Bricks from the synagogue are built into the Szent Erzsébet church at Széchenyi utca 115/b in Mélykút.

Notable names