First Sephardic Synagogue of Banja Luka

OVERVIEW

The story of First Sephardic Synagogue of Banja Luka

Banja Luka, the main town of the Bosanska Krajina in north-western Bosnia, was still part of the Ottoman Empire when its Sephardic Jews built their first synagogue. According to the Jewish Cultural Centre Arie Livne and the Interreligious Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jews are first mentioned in the town in the sixteenth century, but most of them settled there in the middle of the nineteenth, coming mainly from Sarajevo and Travnik. While the Sephardim were still few, they prayed for a short time in a rented space in the town. In 1870 they put up their own synagogue, a building of wooden construction, on the left bank of the Crkvena, a small river that runs through the centre of the town into the Vrbas, on the site now occupied by the city market.

The synagogue stood for only eight years. The community's account says that it was burned to the ground by the Austro-Hungarians, which places its loss in 1878, when Austro-Hungarian troops occupied Bosnia and fought the town's inhabitants in Banja Luka during the first half of August. No contemporary record of the fire has been found. The Sephardim replaced it at the end of 1880 with a second synagogue on Jukićeva Street, on whose site the New Temple of 1936-37 was later built; these and the town's Ashkenazi synagogue are separate buildings.

LOCATION

Where it stood for 8 years

Historic: left bank of the Crkvena river, Banja Luka (Ottoman Bosnia); street unknown. Today: site of the Gradska tržnica (city market), Ive Lole Ribara 4, Dolac, Centar, 78000 Banja Luka (approximate; exact plot unknown).

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The Jewish community

The Sephardic community that built this synagogue was young and small. The Interreligious Council's article says that Jews are first recorded in Banja Luka in the sixteenth century; the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives as its earliest reference the year 1713, when Jewish merchants of the town asked the French government to appoint one of them French commercial consul. The great majority settled in the middle of the nineteenth century, and El Mundo Sefarad, summarising Avram Pinto, says that most came from Sarajevo and Travnik. Soon after their arrival they founded the first Sephardic community and began to build synagogues. The Encyclopaedia Judaica counts 226 Jews in Banja Luka in 1875, three years before the first synagogue was destroyed, 336 in 1895 and 457 in 1927. Ashkenazi Jews later formed a congregation of their own, building their synagogue in 1900-02, so that before the Second World War the town had separate Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities and four synagogues, three Sephardic and one Ashkenazi. The names of the Sephardic community's leaders in the 1870s are unknown.

Architecture and design

Very little is known about the building. The two community accounts say only that it was of wooden construction ('drvene konstrukcije') and that it stood on the left bank of the Crkvena river, on the site of today's city market. No drawing, plan, photograph or description of it has been found, and its size, plan, the arrangement of the Ark and the reader's platform, whether it had a women's gallery, its architect or builder and its seating capacity are all unknown. Its successor of 1880 is recorded with its Ark facing east, which needed the approval of the Sarajevo rabbinate; whether the first building already followed this arrangement is not stated. The community was still small and only recently settled when it was built, which may explain the modest material, but no source says why wood was chosen. Being of timber, it could be burned to the ground completely, and nothing of it is recorded as surviving.

Life inside the synagogue

No source found describes the services or communal life held in the first synagogue. It was the first building of its own for the Sephardic congregation, which had previously met for a short time in rented premises, and it was its house of prayer from 1870 until its destruction in 1878. The congregation followed the Sephardic rite of the Jews of Sarajevo and Travnik, from where most of its members had come. The community's first rabbi named in the sources is Jozef Nahmijas, who personally supervised the building of the second Sephardic synagogue in 1880; the sources do not say whether he was already serving in Banja Luka while the first synagogue stood. The Encyclopaedia Judaica names Menachem Romano as a rabbi of the Sephardim but gives no dates. No inscriptions, ritual objects, records or names of officers connected with the 1870 building are known.

Destruction

The Jewish Cultural Centre Arie Livne and the Interreligious Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina give the same account: eight years after it was built, the synagogue was burned to the ground by the Austro-Hungarians ('spaljena je do temelja od strane Austrougara'). Counting from 1870 this places its destruction in 1878, the year in which Austro-Hungarian forces occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina against armed local resistance. A 2019 study of Austro-Hungarian monuments in Banja Luka records fierce fighting between the troops and the local population in the town between 1 and 17 August 1878, heaviest on 14 August. No source found says whether the synagogue was set alight deliberately or burned in the course of this fighting, and none gives the day. The English Wikipedia list of synagogues in Bosnia and Herzegovina says only that the building was lost 'because of a fire' and names no one. The attribution to the Austro-Hungarians therefore rests on the community's own account, and no contemporary document of the fire has been found.

The community’s fate

The congregation survived the loss of its synagogue and built a second one on Jukićeva Street in 1880, later replaced by the New Temple of 1936-37 on the same site. About 400 Jews lived in Banja Luka before the Second World War. When the Ustaše took power in the Independent State of Croatia at the end of April 1941, the town's Jews were placed outside the law. The Ustaše of Banja Luka, led by Viktor Gutić, began rounding up Jews in June 1941. On 16 July 1941 older Jews of both sexes were taken to Stara Gradiška and all killed there, and on 28 July 1942 the remaining 170 Jews were taken away and murdered in various Ustaše camps. According to Avram Pinto, 150 people, or 37.8 per cent of the community, survived the occupation, and only 24 people returned to their homes after the war.

The site today

The site of the first synagogue lies under Banja Luka's city market (Gradska tržnica) in the Dolac neighbourhood of the town centre, by the Crkvena river. The exact plot within the market area has not been identified in any source consulted, and no remains of the wooden building or any marker on the site are recorded. The map pin marks the market building as mapped in OpenStreetMap and is approximate. The Jewish community of Banja Luka is active today: in 2014 it opened the Jewish Cultural Centre Arie Livne with the Ilona Weiss synagogue, and its history page, the main source for this entry, records the town's four pre-war synagogues.

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