La storia di Old Synagogue of Batelov
Batelov, known in German as Battelau, lies in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands about 15 km southwest of Jihlava. Jews are recorded there from the fifteenth century, and the regional tourist authority of Vysočina writes that the Jewish quarter, a group of houses around a rectangular square with lanes leading off it, was laid out in the mid-fifteenth century together with a small synagogue. The same authority states elsewhere that the date the first synagogue was built is unknown, so the age of the building that stood until 1790 cannot be fixed. It stood on the square of the Jewish quarter.
That synagogue was lost in a great fire. The German regional history site Jüdische Gemeinden says the predecessor of the present building was reduced to rubble and ashes in a major fire some years before about 1795, together with most of the Jewish houses, and gives no year; the Vysočina tourist pages and JewishGen's Cemetery Discovery Project date the fire to 1790. About four years later the community built a new synagogue on the same plot. That successor, later altered in Classicist style, still stands and is not the subject of this entry. No picture, plan or description of the burned building has been found.
Where it stood
Historic: square of the Jewish quarter, Batelov (Battelau), Moravia. Today: plot of the present synagogue on Perleťářská, 588 51 Batelov, Kraj Vysočina (approximate for the old building, which stood on the same plot).
Apri la mappa grande →La comunità ebraica
The Jewish community of Batelov is first mentioned in 1426, according to Jüdische Gemeinden and JewishGen, and Jews lived in the town for about six hundred years. They were under the protection of the local lords of the manor. Around 1750 there were about 25 Jewish families, the number that Jüdische Gemeinden gives as typical for the community, living in houses grouped around the square of the Jewish quarter. In the first half of the nineteenth century the quarter had fourteen houses, as well as a community house with a bakery and a ritual bath that was later pulled down. The Jewish cemetery, outside the town, goes back at least to the sixteenth century, with gravestones from the early eighteenth century the oldest still standing. For most of its history the community belonged to the rabbinate of Třešť, and it had its own rabbi only from the middle of the nineteenth century. Its numbers peaked at about 190 to 200 people around 1846 to 1860; after that emigration reduced it steadily, and it was again joined to Třešť in 1891.
Architettura e design
Nothing is known of the appearance of the synagogue that burned in 1790. No drawing, plan, inventory or written description of it has been found, and the sources consulted give neither its builder, its size nor its materials. The Vysočina tourist authority calls the building of the mid-fifteenth century a small synagogue, which suggests a modest structure suited to a congregation of a few dozen families, but whether the building lost in 1790 was that original one or a later replacement is unknown. Because the fire destroyed the synagogue together with most of the surrounding Jewish houses, the quarter was probably built largely or partly of timber, as was common in small Moravian towns, but no source says so directly. The synagogue that replaced it on the same plot about 1794 to 1795 is a plain rendered hall with a Classicist exterior, and its footprint may reflect the old plot, though this cannot be shown from the sources read.
La vita nella sinagoga
No record of services, officials or furnishings of the old synagogue was found. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the Batelov community had no rabbi of its own and belonged to the rabbinate of Třešť, so in the period when the old building stood its religious life was presumably led by lay members and visiting or district rabbis; this is an inference from the rabbinate arrangement, not a documented fact. The community kept a cemetery outside the town from at least the sixteenth century, and its later records mention a ritual bath in the community house near the synagogue. Two books of community documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries survive in the Moravian Provincial Archives in Brno, and other written records and silver ritual objects were taken to the Jewish Museum in Prague during the Second World War. Whether any of this material describes the synagogue before 1790 is unknown.
Distruzione
The synagogue was destroyed by fire. Jüdische Gemeinden says that the predecessor of the present synagogue was reduced to rubble and ashes in a great fire which also destroyed most of the Jewish houses, and German Wikipedia says only that it was destroyed in a major fire; neither gives a year. The Vysočina regional tourist authority states that the original synagogue was destroyed by a fire in 1790 together with nearby buildings, and JewishGen's Cemetery Discovery Project likewise records a big fire in 1790 that affected the Jewish community. No source consulted says how the fire started, whether it began in the Jewish quarter or elsewhere in the town, or whether anyone was blamed for it. There is no indication that it was an attack on the community. Nothing of the building is known to have survived; a new synagogue was raised on the same site about four years later.
Il destino della comunità
After the middle of the nineteenth century the Batelov community shrank through emigration to larger towns: it numbered 190 in 1846, 134 in 1880, 77 in 1900 and 31 in 1930, and by the early 1930s it was dissolving. After the Nazi German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, the Jews still living in Batelov were deported in May 1942 to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Most of them were sent on from there to the Nazi extermination camps and murdered; very few survived. A memorial in the town commemorates 41 Jews of Batelov who were killed in the Holocaust. No Jewish community was re-established after the war. The community's silver ritual objects and some of its records had been taken to the Jewish Museum in Prague during the war.
Il luogo oggi
The site of the old synagogue is occupied by its successor, the synagogue built about four years after the fire on the same plot on the square of the former Jewish quarter, on today's Perleťářská street. That Classicist building served the Jewish community until the Second World War, was then used by a congregation of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, and since 1984 has been a clubhouse of the local gardeners' association with a fruit-juice press. Nothing of the burned building is known to survive above ground. Several houses of the former Jewish quarter and the Jewish cemetery outside the town also remain. A memorial stone near the synagogue commemorates the 41 Holocaust victims from Batelov.
Hai qualcosa da condividere?
Fotografie, documenti, storie di famiglia o ricordi di questa sinagoga e della sua comunità aiutano a mantenerne viva la storia.
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