Kal Aragon Synagogue, Bitola

Die jüdische Gemeinde

Bitola, called Monastir by its Jews and the Ottomans, received Sephardic exiles from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth century; the first Jewish cemetery is dated to 1497. The community lived in a walled courtyard quarter beside the Dragor river, divided into three cortijos, Aragon, Portugal and Ozer Dalim, each with its own central synagogue. In 1863 about 3,000 Jews lived in the city, and by the early twentieth century the community reached 10,000 or more, though many emigrated to the Americas and Palestine after the Balkan Wars and the First World War, when Bitola lay on the Macedonian front. On the eve of the Second World War about 3,300 Jews remained, most of them poor artisans and small traders speaking Ladino. Kal Aragon was the synagogue of the Aragon courtyard and of the 'upper' congregation.

Architektur und Gestaltung

Kal Aragon was a large building described by Hebrew sources as being in Islamic style, standing beside the main mosque of the city. Its roof rested on four pillars, and above it rose a round drum pierced by tall windows, carrying a large central dome flanked by two smaller domes. The walls were painted with a menorah and a rising sun, and a large chandelier hung in the hall. The Torah ark was set in a covered niche in the east wall. Photographs of 1913 and of the inter-war years show an elaborately carved and painted ark and an enclosed bimah with turned balusters and hanging lamps. The building was repeatedly rebuilt after fires, most recently after 1863 and 1897, and its dome was rebuilt after it collapsed under shelling in the First World War. The architect of the last building is unknown.

Leben in der Synagoge

Kal Aragon was the principal synagogue of Monastir and the seat of its rabbis. Rabbis associated with the community over the centuries include David Adiges (1575), Avraham Falcon (1643), Shmuel Tsadok, Benjamin Medina (1730), Avraham and David de Buton (eighteenth century), Mercado Kamhi (1838), Ariel Ben-Zion (1913) and Shabtai Djaen (1924). The last rabbi, Avraham Moritz Romano, took office in 1931 and was murdered at Treblinka in 1943. Services followed the Sephardic rite in Hebrew, with sermons and community life in Ladino. In May 1913 the French photographer Auguste Léon of Albert Kahn's Archives of the Planet photographed the interior in colour, and the Manaki brothers, Bitola's pioneering photographers, recorded the ark and bimah between the wars.

Zerstörung

During the First World War shelling caused the dome to collapse and burned the community's ancient Torah scroll, but the synagogue was restored. In April 1941 Bitola was annexed by Bulgaria, an ally of Germany. After the Bulgarian police and army deported the city's Jews on 11 March 1943, the Bulgarian occupiers turned Kal Aragon into a slaughterhouse for pigs. In 1944, before withdrawing, they wrecked and looted the building; Macedonian sources say it was set alight. In 1947 the post-war Yugoslav authorities razed the ruins, which a photograph of that year shows as a roofless shell with its dome amid rubble.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

In April 1941 Bitola was occupied and annexed to Bulgaria, an ally of Nazi Germany. Under the agreement of 22 February 1943 between the SS officer Theodor Dannecker and the Bulgarian commissar Aleksandar Belev, Bulgarian police and soldiers rounded up the Jews of Bitola on 11 March 1943 and took them to the Monopol tobacco warehouse in Skopje. From there they were deported in three transports, on 22, 25 and 29 March 1943, to the Treblinka extermination camp, where they were murdered on arrival; the 29 March train carried about 2,300 Jews from Bitola. About 3,276 Bitola Jews were deported and none of them survived.

Der Ort heute

Nothing of the synagogue survives. The site is now occupied by the Dr Haim Abravanel health centre, known locally as 'Uredot', near the main mosque in the centre of Bitola. The Jewish courtyard quarter around it disappeared after the war, and Bitola has no Jewish community today. The city's Jewish cemetery, one of the oldest in the Balkans, survives on the edge of town. The other two great synagogues of the quarter, Kal Portugal opposite and Ozer Dalim nearby, have also vanished, so that no synagogue building of Monastir's three courtyards remains standing.

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