Old Synagogue of Békéscsaba

הקהילה היהודית

Micheller dates the arrival of Jews in Békéscsaba to the early nineteenth century. In 1825 five Jews lived in the town, trading in sacks and canvas, and the county census of 1829-30 counted 14 families with 55 people. Among the earliest settlers she lists Lőrinc Kohn, Ábrahám Tevan, Ábrahám Leitesdorfer, József Lamberger and Juda Dembitsch; a receipt from the Arad salt office for the toleration tax of 1832-33 suggests that they already formed a community. Between about 1840 and 1855 many more families arrived, especially from Trencsén, Árva, Liptó and Nyitra counties in the north, among them the Oppenheimer, Lévi, Lővi, Kurtag, Reisz, Weisz and Schwarcz families. The community kept minutes from 1850, when József Lamberger was president. After the 1848-49 revolution the Békés county Jews were assessed 3,300 forints of the war levy imposed on Hungarian Jewry, of which Csaba paid 620. Registers were ordered in 1851, a school opened in 1855, and the community grew quickly after emancipation in 1867. By 1941 Békéscsaba had 2,433 Jewish inhabitants.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

Almost nothing is known about the appearance of the first synagogue. The only documentary detail found is the carpentry contract, in which János Horváth, a carpenter from Csaba, agreed to carry out the carpentry of the synagogue for 400 forints without supplying the timber. This suggests a building with a substantial timber roof structure, and possibly timber galleries or ceilings, but the contract as summarised by Micheller gives no dimensions or plan. Building began in 1846; the date of completion is not given, so the year shown here is approximate. No architect or master builder is named, and no drawing, photograph or plan of the building was found. The Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives holds several photographs and two postcards of a Békéscsaba synagogue with a towered façade, but these show the later Neolog synagogue of 1893, not this building. The size of the hall, the number of seats, the arrangement of the women's gallery and the style of the exterior are all unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

The first rabbi associated with the synagogue was József Hirschfeld, who was already serving in 1840, before the building was begun, and who gave his sermons in German. Yiddish was the everyday language of the community, while its school taught in German before Hungarian-language teachers were confirmed in 1877. Hirschfeld served until his death in 1879. His successor, E. H. Kohn, formerly rabbi of Dunaföldvár, was elected chief rabbi and installed in 1881. The years of the old synagogue's last use were troubled. After the Jewish Congress of 1868, 86 members protested in early 1870 against joining the Congress (Neolog) organisation, and the congregation stayed for some years a Status Quo community. At a board meeting in 1883 it accepted the Congress organisation; older and more conservative members, unhappy also with the choice of rabbi, left to found an Orthodox community, and two years of litigation followed over taxing the members who had left and over a separate register. The Orthodox opened their own school in 1884.

הרס

No source found gives a date or a reason for the demolition of the first synagogue. Micheller states only that it was later pulled down and that a new two-towered synagogue was built, inaugurated in 1893. Gazda's survey records the old building as in use until 1884 and as demolished at the time of her 1980-87 fieldwork, but she gives no date of demolition. Read together, these sources suggest that the building went out of use in the mid-1880s, when the congregation divided and planned a larger synagogue, and that it was demolished at some point after that, quite possibly in connection with the new building. That is an inference: no document of the demolition, no buyer and no contractor is named in any source consulted, and who demolished the building is not recorded. No source shows it standing in the twentieth century.

גורל הקהילה

After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the mayor in May concentrated the Jews of Békéscsaba, about 770 families or 2,200 people, in some 100 designated houses on streets including Luther utca, Jókai utca and Prónay utca. In June 3,113 Jews from the town and from Bánhegyes, Békés, Elek, Endrőd, Gyula, Mezőkovácsháza, Orosháza, Szarvas and Tótkomlós were packed into the yard of the tobacco works. Their entrainment, on 25 June according to Micheller, was overseen by the Hungarian gendarmerie lieutenant-colonel László Ferenczy; hvg.hu gives transports to Auschwitz on 22 and 26 June 1944, while some deportees from the region were sent to Strasshof. Chief Rabbi Jakab Silberfeld did not survive Auschwitz. Estimates of survivors differ: 182 returned according to one historian, and hvg.hu adds about 200 men who survived labour service. Micheller writes that barely more than a hundred came back to the town. The Neolog and Orthodox communities united in 1950 under Rabbi Schlomo Snitzer, the Neolog synagogue was sold, and by the 1990s there was no official community. A new synagogue opened in 2004.

האתר כיום

The site of the first synagogue has not been identified in any source consulted. Micheller notes that the community's first school moved in its early years to a building put up by the community in today's Luther utca, and the later Neolog and Orthodox synagogues stood opposite each other in the same street, so the old synagogue may also have stood in this part of the town centre, but no source says so. The map pin is therefore a placeholder at the centre of Békéscsaba. Both later synagogues still stand: the Neolog building, stripped of its towers and gables and clad in metal, is a furniture shop, and the former Orthodox synagogue houses an air-conditioning business. A Holocaust memorial wall stands in the garden of the synagogue built in 2004.

שמות בולטים