Čachtice Synagogue

PRZEGLĄD

Historia Čachtice Synagogue

Čachtice, known in Hungarian as Csejte and in German as Cachticz, lies below its castle on the old road from Nové Mesto nad Váhom to Trnava, in what was historically Nitra county and is now the Trenčín Region. Its Jewish community was one of the older ones of north-western Hungary: about 100 Jews lived there in the 1730s and 309 in the 1780s, and in 1851 Elek Fényes's geographical dictionary recorded 142 Jews and a synagogue in the town.

According to Maroš Borský's survey of synagogue architecture in Slovakia, the synagogue was built in the first third of the nineteenth century; a published list of Slovak synagogues gives about 1830, and a Slovak heritage gazetteer says the beginning of the century. Borský places it in the small group of so-called nine-bay synagogues, a type that originated in seventeenth-century Poland and reached Slovakia only in a handful of towns, among them Trenčín, Stupava, Ľubotice, Huncovce and Bardejov. Its sanctuary is known only from preserved documentation: a photograph of an interior detail and a drawing by the engineer Eugen Bárkány, both reproduced by Borský. The architect is unknown. The building was demolished in 1955, and its exact site in the town has not been identified.

LOKALIZACJA

Where it stood for nearly 130 years

Historic: Csejte (Čachtice), Nitra county, Kingdom of Hungary; street unknown. Today: Unknown; approximate pin in the centre of the municipality of Čachtice, 916 21, okres Nové Mesto nad Váhom, Trenčín Region.

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Społeczność żydowska

Jews settled in Čachtice early. Borský, drawing on eighteenth-century censuses, counts about 100 Jews in the town in 1735-1738, which placed it ninth among the Jewish communities of north-western Hungary, behind Bratislava, Nové Mesto nad Váhom, Senica, Šaštín, Holíč, Vrbové, Hlohovec and Stupava. Fifty years later the community had grown threefold to 309 people and was among the ten largest in the region. It then declined: Fényes's dictionary of 1851 describes Čachtice as a Slovak market town of 1,596 Catholics, 48 Lutherans and 142 Jews, with a Catholic and a Lutheran church and a synagogue, good wine almost equal to that of Nové Mesto nad Váhom, a water mill and regular fairs. No source read gives the community's size in the twentieth century, its religious affiliation after the Hungarian schism of 1869, or the names of its rabbis and officers. Its cemetery on a hillside in the town survives.

Architektura i projekt

Borský classes the Čachtice synagogue with the nine-bay synagogues, a Polish invention first seen in Lublin and Lviv in the 1620s and 1630s and later spread to Moravia, Hungary and Slovakia. The type solved an old problem of placing the bimah in the centre of the hall: four pillars or columns in the middle of the sanctuary carried the vaulted or coffered ceiling, dividing it into nine bays, three by three, and the bimah stood between them, so that the supports did not block the view of the ark. In Čachtice, Borský writes, the only preserved documentation shows the sanctuary with the bimah between the four columns of this nine-bay ceiling. He cites two images, an interior detail and an interior drawing by Ing. Eugen Bárkány, who surveyed Slovak synagogues in the twentieth century; neither could be obtained for this entry. Nothing is known of the exterior, the roof, the women's gallery, the materials or the seating capacity, and no architect or builder is recorded.

Życie w synagodze

The nine-bay plan itself says something about worship in Čachtice: it was a traditional Ashkenazi arrangement, with the reading of the Torah from a raised bimah at the centre of the hall and the ark on the eastern wall, a layout Borský links to the liturgical needs that shaped synagogues of this type. In such buildings the men prayed in the main hall around the bimah, and women sat in a separate gallery or room, though how this was arranged in Čachtice is not documented. The community buried its dead in its own cemetery on a hillside in the town, whose nineteenth-century tombstones of marble and sandstone carry Hebrew and German inscriptions. No source read names a rabbi, cantor, teacher or community president, records whether the congregation was Orthodox, Neolog or Status Quo after 1869, or preserves recollections by former members. The entry on Čachtice in the Pinkas Hakehillot encyclopaedia of Slovak Jewish communities, which might hold such details, is not available in translation online.

Zniszczenie

No source read reports damage to the synagogue during the Second World War. Borský's catalogue of demolished Slovak synagogues gives 1955 as the year of demolition, and the Slovak heritage gazetteer pamiatkynaslovensku.sk, which draws on his work, states that it was pulled down in 1955; a published list of Slovak synagogues gives the same year. By then Czechoslovakia had been under Communist rule since February 1948, so the building came down under the Communist regime, but no source read says who ordered or carried out the demolition, whether the building had first been sold or transferred by a Jewish body, or why it was taken down. Who demolished the Čachtice synagogue is not recorded in the sources found. The demolition of an early nineteenth-century nine-bay synagogue removed one of only six examples of the type known in Slovakia, of which only Stupava and Bardejov survive.

Los społeczności

No source read gives the number of Jews living in Čachtice on the eve of the Holocaust or describes their fate individually. The town lay in the wartime Slovak State. In 1942 that state organised the deportation of about 57,700 Jews, roughly two-thirds of its Jewish population, between 25 March and late October: the Hlinka Guard and gendarmes rounded them up and loaded the trains, Slovak government offices arranged the transports, and Nazi Germany, through the SS adviser Dieter Wisliceny, planned them with the Slovak authorities and received them at the border. The trains went to Auschwitz and to ghettos and camps in the Lublin district; only a few hundred of the deportees survived. Jews from nearby Nové Mesto nad Váhom were sent on a transport to Opole on 27 April 1942. After the Slovak National Uprising and the Nazi German invasion in late August 1944, about 13,500 to 14,150 more Jews were deported from Slovakia. No Jewish community was re-established in Čachtice after the war.

Miejsce dzisiaj

The plot on which the synagogue stood has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not known what occupies it today. The municipality's history pages describe the castle, the Gothic church and the manor house but do not mention the synagogue. No surviving fragment of the building and no marker on its site was found. The map pin for this entry follows the coordinates given by the heritage gazetteer pamiatkynaslovensku.sk, which fall in the centre of the town; they are not based on a documented footprint and should be read as approximate. The Jewish cemetery survives on a hillside in the town, without a sign, reached across private property and partly used as a garden. Old cadastral maps of Čachtice or the Bárkány survey material would be needed to fix the synagogue's address.

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