Borský Svätý Jur Synagogue

PRZEGLĄD

Historia Borský Svätý Jur Synagogue

Borský Svätý Jur (Hungarian Búrszentgyörgy) lies about 21 km north of Malacky in the sandy, forested Záhorie plain, and today belongs to the Senica district of the Trnava region. Before 1920 it was part of the Malacky district of Pozsony (Pressburg) county in the Kingdom of Hungary. The village belonged to the Batthyány family's estate, and in the mid-nineteenth century the geographer Elek Fényes counted 208 Jews among its roughly 3,200 inhabitants, a substantial minority for a village of its size.

Only two facts about the synagogue itself have been found. A Slovak gazetteer of monuments, citing the village's 2014 history book, says it stood on the plot of house no. 375 and was demolished in 1947. A separate Slovak list of lost synagogues records a synagogue completed in 1897 and gone in 1947 under the name of the neighbouring village of Borský Svätý Mikuláš; the matching demolition year makes it likely that this is the same building, entered under the wrong village name. No photograph, plan, description or name of a builder or rabbi has been found. The building was not included in Maroš Borský's 2005 survey of Slovak synagogue architecture, which suggests that it was a modest village prayer house rather than a major monument.

LOKALIZACJA

Where it stood for 50 years

Historic: plot of house no. 375, Borský Svätý Jur (Búrszentgyörgy), Malacky district, Pozsony county. Today: Štepničky street area, 908 79 Borský Svätý Jur, Senica district, Trnava region (approximate; coordinates from pamiatkynaslovensku.sk).

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Społeczność żydowska

Jews were living in Borský Svätý Jur by the first half of the nineteenth century. Elek Fényes, whose gazetteer of Hungary appeared in 1851, described the village as a Slovak settlement in Pozsony county with 2,967 Catholic and 208 Jewish inhabitants, a Catholic parish church, four water mills and a manorial farm of the Batthyány estate. The village had been a post station since the eighteenth century and the market town for the area was nearby Šaštín (Sasvár). One member of the community became well known: the scholar Moritz Friedländer was born in the village on 17 October 1844; he later studied in Prague and from 1875 served in Vienna as secretary of the Israelitische Allianz, working for Jewish emigrants from Russia and for Jewish schooling in Galicia. The total population of the village fell after 1828, when it had 3,124 inhabitants, to about 2,100 in 1900, and the Jewish community probably shrank in the same way, but no later Jewish population figures, community records or names of officers were found in the sources consulted.

Architektura i projekt

Nothing is known about the appearance of the synagogue. No photograph, postcard, drawing, plan or written description of it was found in the sources consulted, and it does not appear in Maroš Borský's catalogue of Slovak synagogues, which was compiled from surviving buildings, archive plans and photographs. The only data are a completion year of 1897, which comes from a Slovak list of lost synagogues that files the building under the neighbouring village of Borský Svätý Mikuláš, and its site on the plot of house no. 375, which places it on an ordinary residential plot among the village houses rather than on a square. A synagogue built at that date for a small rural congregation in western Slovakia would most likely have been a modest single-storey hall, but that is a general observation, not a documented fact about this building. Its size, materials, style, architect, builder, seating capacity and interior fittings are all unknown.

Życie w synagodze

No account of worship in the Borský Svätý Jur synagogue has been found. The sources consulted do not say whether the congregation followed the Orthodox or the Neolog rite after the Hungarian Jewish schism of 1868-1869, whether it had its own rabbi or was served by a rabbi from a larger nearby town, or whether it kept a school, ritual bath or burial society. The community did have its own cemetery: two nineteenth-century sandstone tombstones with Hebrew inscriptions still survive there, though no longer in their original places. The building of a new synagogue as late as 1897, if the date belongs to this building, shows that the congregation was still able to raise funds for a house of prayer at the end of the nineteenth century. The names of its rabbis, cantors, presidents and members during the years the synagogue was in use remain unknown.

Zniszczenie

The synagogue was demolished in 1947. The date is given by a Slovak gazetteer of monuments, which cites the village's own history book, Borský Svätý Jur. Cesta dejinami (2014), and the same year appears in a Slovak list of lost synagogues, which says only that the building disappeared shortly after the Second World War. No source read describes damage to the building during the war, when the Jews of Slovakia were deprived of their property under the Slovak State's Aryanization laws, and none says whether the building was used for another purpose after its congregation was gone. Who decided on the demolition and who carried it out is not recorded in the sources consulted. The demolition took place before the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948, so it cannot be attributed to the Communist regime. Whether the building was first sold by a surviving community or by the central Jewish organisation, or taken over by the village, is unknown.

Los społeczności

No source consulted gives the number or names of Jews living in Borský Svätý Jur in 1940, or describes what happened to them. They shared the fate of the Jews of the Slovak State. Under the Aryanization laws Jewish businesses and property were taken over, mostly by members of the ruling Slovak fascist parties and their paramilitary groups, and by January 1942 most Slovak Jews had lost their livelihoods. Between 25 March and 20 October 1942 almost 58,000 Jews, two-thirds of the Jewish population, were rounded up by the Hlinka Guard, the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel and the gendarmerie and deported to Auschwitz and to ghettos and camps in the Lublin district; only a few hundred of them survived. After the Nazi German invasion of Slovakia in August 1944 another 13,500 Jews were deported and hundreds more were murdered in Slovakia by Einsatzgruppe H and Hlinka Guard units. Of 89,000 Jews in Slovakia in 1940, about 69,000 were murdered. No organised Jewish community is recorded in Borský Svätý Jur after the war.

Miejsce dzisiaj

The synagogue stood on the plot of house no. 375. A Slovak gazetteer of monuments places that plot at 48.613867 N, 17.043965 E, which falls on Štepničky, a residential street in the village; what stands on the plot today has not been checked. No surviving fragment of the building and no marker on the site is recorded. The Jewish cemetery has also been liquidated: the US Commission survey, documented in 2009, describes it as a privately owned garden in a flat suburban area with no sign, wall or gate, where two nineteenth-century sandstone tombstones with Hebrew inscriptions remain, no longer in their original positions.

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