Second Sephardic Synagogue of Banja Luka

The Jewish community

According to testimony recorded by Stojan Bjelić and cited by Jakov Danon and Verica Stošić, Salamon Haim Poljokan (Levi), who arrived in Banja Luka in 1860, found three fellow Jews there: A. Baruh, Isak Papo called Papić, and Mento Levi, treasurer of a Sephardic community that archival evidence dates to between 1848 and 1850. A census of 1879 counted 187 Jews in Banja Luka; later counts gave 327 in 1885, 336 in 1895 and 421 in 1910, of whom 222 were Sephardim and 199 Ashkenazim. Newcomers came from Sarajevo, Skopje and Belgrade, and Sephardic families moved over the Drina from Serbia after restrictive laws there in 1866. The Sephardic rabbis named by Danon and Stošić are Jozef Nahmijas, Jakov Elijas, Menahem Romano and M. Atijas, though their years of office are not given. The community's minute book was begun in 1905 by its then president, Salamon A. Poljokan (Levi). The best-known Sephardic families were the Poljokan (Levi) and Sarafić (Salom). The Ashkenazim formed a separate, wealthier community in 1883, and the two shared one cemetery at Borik.

Architecture and design

Almost nothing is known about the building's appearance. No photograph or drawing that can be identified as the synagogue of 1880 was found; the 1937 plans and perspective drawing reproduced by the Jewish Cultural Centre show its successor, and an early twentieth-century postcard captioned 'Isr. Tempel', held by the Center for Jewish Art and reproduced on Wikimedia Commons, appears to show the domed Ashkenazi synagogue instead. The sources record only its location, in Jukićeva ulica in the town centre, and one unusual feature. In Sephardic practice in Bosnia the Torah ark was placed on the south wall, facing Jerusalem, but according to a tradition passed down by hadži Rafo Poljokan the building could technically be completed only with the ark on the east side. The community asked the rabbinate in Sarajevo for advice, and the rabbis allowed the ark to stay on the east wall. The meldar school was part of the same building or complex. The size of the hall, its materials, its style, the builder and the number of seats are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

The synagogue was the religious centre of the Sephardic community of Banja Luka from 1880 to the mid-1930s. Jewish boys received their first schooling in the meldar attached to it, learning the Hebrew alphabet and prayers, as the earlier wooden synagogue's meldar had done for 23 boys; the community offices and the rabbi's residence were across the street. Rabbi Jozef Nahmijas, who had supervised its construction, was the first rabbi of the congregation, and he was followed at some point by Jakov Elijas and Menahem Romano; M. Atijas was the Sephardic rabbi by the late 1930s. From 1905 the community kept a formal minute book, started by its president Salamon A. Poljokan (Levi), but Danon and Stošić report that the record books of both the Sephardic and the Ashkenazi communities were completely destroyed in the war, which is one reason why so little is known about worship and communal life in the building. The growth of the congregation in the early twentieth century, to more than two hundred Sephardim by 1910, left the synagogue too small by the 1930s.

Destruction

The synagogue was not destroyed by violence. It was pulled down by its own congregation to make way for a larger building. The Jewish Cultural Centre Arie Livne and the Interreligious Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina both state that in 1934 the community applied for a permit for a new community building on Jukićeva ulica, 'because the existing one was earmarked for demolition', and that in 1936 a new synagogue began to be built quickly 'on the same spot where the old temple stood', because the Sephardic community kept growing and the old synagogue had become too small. Danon and Stošić describe the building of 1936/37 as the community's third synagogue, with a cultural home, which indicates a new building rather than a rebuilding of the old walls. No source found gives the exact date of the demolition, says who carried it out, or mentions any part of the 1880 building being reused. The demolition is therefore dated about 1936 from the start of the new building. The New Temple that replaced it was itself wrecked in the Second World War and is covered in a separate entry.

The community’s fate

About 480 Jews lived in Banja Luka in 1941. After the town came under the Ustaše regime of the Independent State of Croatia in April 1941, the Ustaše commissioner Viktor Gutić began anti-Jewish measures at once: confiscation of property, yellow badges, forced labour and expulsion from the town centre on 5 May 1941. On Gutić's orders 31 Jews and 8 Serbs from Banja Luka were sent to the Ustaše camp at Gospić, whose commander confirmed their arrival on 25 July 1941; most were killed in the Gospić and Jadovno camps. On the night of 27 to 28 July 1942 the Ustaše arrested all remaining Jews of Banja Luka and sent them to the Jasenovac, Gradina and Stara Gradiška camps. Danon and Stošić put the loss at 62.3 per cent of the community; Avram Pinto, as quoted on the elmundosefarad site, estimates that about 150 people, 37.8 per cent, survived. A small community was re-formed after the war and numbered 92 in 2009; the Gruber survey of 2011 gives about 50.

The site today

The plot on Jukićeva ulica where the synagogue of 1880 stood was reused for the New Temple and Jewish cultural home of 1936/37, so nothing of the first building is known to survive. The successor was wrecked during the Second World War and its plot was sold after the war. The site lies at the corner of the present-day streets Ivana Franje Jukića and Jevrejska in the Centar district of Banja Luka, where the map pin of the catalogue's New Temple entry is placed; this entry uses the same pin. No marker for the synagogue of 1880 is recorded. The town's present Jewish community worships elsewhere, in the Ilona Weiss synagogue opened in 2014.

Notable names