Brčko Synagogue

La comunità ebraica

According to Vijoglavin Mančić, the Brčko community was founded around 1850 by Sephardic newcomers. Its families came from Sarajevo (Levi), Bijeljina (Alkalay, Perera, Altarac, Salom), Zvornik (Finci), Gradačac (Kabiljo) and the Serbian towns of Belgrade (Eškenazi) and Šabac (Almusino, Avramović). The 1879 census recorded 46 Jews; the counts of 1885 and 1895 showed growth, and the 1910 census listed 54 Sephardim and 127 Ashkenazim in the municipality. The Ashkenazi families, among them Benau, Friedmann, Schoenwald, Fuhrmann, Naschitz, Weil, Palfi and Zentner, came from towns across Austria-Hungary and were already settled before 1900. No written record shows that they ever formed a separate congregation, although local memory speaks of an Ashkenazi prayer house in the former Tuzlanska street. Jews were merchants, craftsmen and professionals; the photographer Samuel Zentner and the publisher Isak S. Alkalay are named among them. Brčko had fewer than 7,000 inhabitants before the Second World War, about 2 per cent of them Jewish, and the Croatian Wikipedia gives about 350 Jews in the area in 1941, including refugees from Austria.

Architettura e design

No description, plan or photograph of the Brčko synagogue was found in the sources read for this entry. Vijoglavin Mančić notes that the only published account of its architecture is a short passage in Vedrana Gotovac's Sinagoge u Bosni i Hercegovini (Sarajevo, 1987), pages 49 and 50, which could not be consulted. What is known is limited to its date and setting. It was completed in 1881, three years after the Austro-Hungarian occupation, when Brčko was being rebuilt as a modern river port and market town with new churches, mosques, a town hall and hotels. The Croatian Wikipedia places it in the town centre. It was built for a Sephardic congregation of perhaps fifty people, so it was probably a modest building, but its size, materials, style, seating capacity and the name of its builder are unknown. The gendarmerie report that it burned to its foundations suggests that much of its fabric, or at least its roof and fittings, was of timber.

La vita nella sinagoga

The synagogue was the seat of the Jevrejska bogoštovna opština Brčko, which kept birth, marriage and death registers in Hebrew and Ladino in Rashi script, and later in Serbo-Croatian. A statute of the community from 1924 to 1926 survives in the Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade. The only surviving extract from its registers is the birth certificate of Hajim Koen Avramović, issued on 4 September 1922 and written in Cyrillic. It is signed by the community president, Santo S. Alkalay, and by the registrar, Rabbi Leon Katan, and names the mohel, Cadik Baruh. Religious teaching for the town's schools reflected the community's two strands: David Finci taught the Sephardic religion class at the trade school in 1903-1904, and Isak Weiss taught the Austro-Hungarian (Ashkenazi) Jews in 1908-1910. From the school year 1913-1914 Rabbi Katan became the single teacher of Jewish religion for all Jewish pupils, which suggests that by then the Sephardic and Ashkenazi families worshipped together in this building.

Distruzione

Brčko came under the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in April 1941, and Nazi German troops were in the town. According to Vijoglavin Mančić, a Nazi German army unit showed an antisemitic propaganda film in the local cinema one evening and afterwards destroyed the synagogue; she writes that the Nazi German army blew it up. She quotes a report of the command of the 6th Croatian Gendarmerie Regiment in Sarajevo, held by the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade (U-D M-68): on 20 May 1941 Nazi German soldiers in Brčko set the Jewish synagogue on fire, and it burned down to its foundations. The report is dated 3 May 1941 in her footnote, which cannot be right for an event of 20 May and is probably a misprint for a later date. The fire also destroyed the entire archive of the Jewish community. The Croatian Wikipedia instead says that the synagogue was demolished in 1942, without naming who did it; this may refer to the removal of the burnt ruin, but no source read explains the difference. The perpetrators named in the sources are Nazi German forces.

Il destino della comunità

In the Independent State of Croatia the Jews of Brčko were robbed and persecuted by the Ustaše. On the afternoon of 7 December 1941 a drum announcement ordered all Jews, regardless of sex or age, to report to the gymnasium building, supposedly to be sent to a concentration camp. According to evidence gathered by the postwar State Commission for war crimes, the district prefect Većeslav Montani organised the operation. Ustaše of the 18th and 20th companies of the Poglavnik's Bodyguard battalion under the Ustaša officer Baljak Ventura tied the Jews with wire, marched them through deep snow to the pontoon bridge over the Sava and killed them all that night with hammers requisitioned from locksmiths and smiths, together with Jewish families from Vrbanja and Rajevo Selo. Three days later, on 10 December, about 300 Jewish refugees from Austria, with their children, were stripped, beaten with hammers and buried in a pit at the old Orthodox cemetery. Croatian Wikipedia counts about 200 local Jews killed in 1941 and 1942; JewishGen gives 150. A few survived elsewhere, and no community was re-established after the war.

Il luogo oggi

The Croatian Wikipedia states that the synagogue stood on the site now occupied by the police of Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the town centre. The exact plot has not been confirmed from a map or cadastral record. The only police building mapped in OpenStreetMap lies in the Ciglana-Mujkići area west of the old centre, which does not sit easily with the description of a central site, so the map pin should be treated as provisional. No trace of the building survives. The Jewish cemetery was destroyed, its remnants removed for a road in 1988; some gravestones were saved by a local Orthodox priest. A memorial to the victims stands in the town.

Nomi importanti