Old Schlossberg Synagogue, Bratislava

RESUMEN

La historia de Old Schlossberg Synagogue, Bratislava

From the late sixteenth century, when the Pálffy family held Bratislava Castle and its estate, Jews barred from living inside the walled town of Pressburg settled on the castle's own land: the Schlossberg (Schlossgrund, Podhradie) on the hillside and the Zuckermandl along the Danube. Yad Vashem records that by 1708 the community kept two synagogues, one of them in the Schlossberg quarter. In 1714 Count Mikuláš (Nikolaus) Pálffy issued a letter of protection that allowed the Jews to build two synagogues, one on the Schlossberg and one on the Zuckermandl. According to the historian Katarína Hradská, the community bought the house of the town tailor Martin Sieber in late July 1716, pulled it down, widened the plot by blasting away part of the castle rock and completed a small synagogue within a year. Thomas Musil, drawing on Hugo Gold's history of 1932, describes it as closer to a simple prayer house and says the plot was chosen because it could be enlarged, which was done in 1783. The building burned at least once, and the sources disagree on whether it was rebuilt. Hradská states that it served, with a short break after a fire in 1796, until 1862, when the community demolished it to put up the large Orthodox synagogue designed by Ignaz Feigler the Younger on the same spot.

UBICACIÓN

Where it stood for nearly 150 years

Historic: Schlossstraße (Zámocká ulica), Schlossberg/Schlossgrund below Pressburg Castle, on the plot later occupied by the Orthodox synagogue of 1862-63; house number unknown. Today: Zámocká ulica area, Bratislava I, below Bratislava Castle (approximate).

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La comunidad judía

Jews had lived in Pressburg since the Middle Ages, but after the Battle of Mohács in 1526 they left the town and were not allowed back inside its walls; according to the local historian Josef Wallner, the Pálffy counts permitted them in 1599 to settle below the castle. The ghetto that grew there, with its Judengasse (Židovská ulica) and the parallel Schlossstraße (Zámocká ulica), stood on the castle estate and outside the town's jurisdiction. Musil notes that the community grew markedly from 1670, when Jews expelled from Vienna and Lower Austria arrived. Yad Vashem dates the burial society to about 1689 and names Yom-Tov Lipmann as chief rabbi in the late seventeenth century. Hradská names Šimon Michal (Simon Pressburger), a court factor with influence in Vienna, as head of the young community; in 1709 he paid for a house of study on Zámocká ulica. The 1714 Pálffy charter regulated the relationship between some 40 to 50 resident families and their lords. By the nineteenth century the community had become one of the most important in Central Europe, and Hugo Gold counted about eight synagogues and prayer rooms around 1830.

Arquitectura y diseño

No picture, plan or detailed description of this synagogue was found. What is known comes from two accounts of its site. Hradská writes that the community demolished the tailor Sieber's house to make room for it and widened the plot by blasting part of the castle rock, damaging a neighbouring house that belonged to a baker named Rossbach; he sued and received 80 gulden in compensation. She calls the result a small synagogue, built in a single year. Musil, following Gold, says it resembled a simple prayer house more than a monumental synagogue. He also says the building turned out much cheaper than expected, so that money was left to renovate the Zuckermandl prayer house and the house of study; in his text this sentence follows the 1783 enlargement, so it may refer to that work rather than the first building. The plot lay on the slope between the castle and the town, on the street later called Zámocká ulica; Musil places it where the later Great Schul stood. The architect, the builder, the seating, the layout of the women's section and the appearance of the exterior are unknown.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

For about a century and a half this was the main communal synagogue of the Schlossberg settlement, while a second congregation met on the Zuckermandl and many smaller prayer rooms were kept in ground-floor and upper-floor rooms of houses in the Judengasse. Hradská quotes Matej Bel's eighteenth-century description of Pressburg, which says the Jews kept a rabbi paid from communal contributions who was free to enter and leave the synagogue, preached about once a year and settled disputed religious questions, while others performed weddings, circumcisions, slaughter and burials. The synagogue stood next to the community's other institutions on the same street, among them the house of study founded by Šimon Michal in 1709 and, later, the yeshiva on Zámocká ulica. The decades in which the old synagogue was in use included the tenure of Moses Sofer (the Chatam Sofer), chief rabbi of Pressburg and head of its yeshiva from 1806 to 1839, but no source read names him in connection with this particular building. No description of its services, furnishings or Torah ark survives in the sources consulted.

Destrucción

The sources agree that the synagogue suffered a serious fire but differ on what followed. Yad Vashem says that during the eighteenth century the building was renovated and expanded twice and was ultimately destroyed in a fire, after which prayer rooms were opened throughout the Schlossberg quarter. Musil says it burned down a little after the enlargement of 1783, without giving a year. Hradská dates the fire to 1796 and says it caused only a short interruption, after which the small synagogue served until 1862. Its end, as Hradská and Musil describe it, came at the community's own decision. In the early 1860s the Pressburg Jews resolved to build a large synagogue on the old site in the Schlossstraße and commissioned the Pressburg architect Ignaz Feigler the Younger. While it was being built, Hradská writes, the congregation prayed in the Pálffy court. The community bought two neighbouring buildings and demolished them together with the old synagogue, which had become inadequate. Construction began in 1862 and the new synagogue was finished at the end of 1863. The old building was therefore not destroyed by any hostile actor; it was cleared by its own congregation.

El destino de la comunidad

The congregation that had used the old synagogue continued in the Orthodox synagogue built on its site and in the prayer rooms of the quarter, which Yad Vashem says existed until the community was destroyed in the Holocaust. Musil, citing Palyóová, gives about 18,000 Jews in Bratislava before the Second World War; Wallner gives about 15,000, around a tenth of the population. After the Slovak State was set up in 1939, its government stripped Jews of their rights, jobs and property. Hradská describes Hlinka Guardsmen occupying the Židovská ulica, and in March 1942 the first deportees, young women and girls, were assembled at Patrónka in Bratislava. Musil writes that a collection camp was set up in the city in 1942 and that nearly 60,000 Jews were deported from Slovakia that year. After the Slovak National Uprising in 1944, Nazi German troops occupied Bratislava and organised further deportations; few could hide, flee or join the insurgents. About 4,000 Jews lived in the city after 1945, and emigration reduced the number further.

El lugar hoy

Nothing of the old synagogue survives. Its site was reused for the Orthodox synagogue of 1862-63, which according to Musil was wrecked by the Nazis in 1938, survived the war badly damaged and was demolished in 1961 because of its advanced decay. Hradská writes that Zámocká ulica with its history disappeared in the 1970s, when the Communist-era authorities of the time decided to do away with the Jewish monuments below the castle. The street has since been rebuilt on a different line, and the exact plot has not been matched to a present-day address in any source consulted. The map pin marks the present Zámocká ulica on the castle slope and is approximate.

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