Častá Synagogue

סקירה

הסיפור של Častá Synagogue

Častá (Hungarian Cseszte, German Schattmannsdorf) lies in the Pezinok district of the Bratislava region, at the foot of the Little Carpathians and beneath Červený Kameň Castle, for centuries a seat of the Pálffy counts. Jews settled here under the protection of the estate, and the village kept two Jewish cemeteries, an older one beside the castle and a newer one at the south-eastern edge of the village.

The Bratislava regional monuments office (KPÚ Bratislava), in its 2022 survey of lost synagogues in the region, places the synagogue on Hlavná ulica (Main Street), conscription number 447, orientation number 189, on parcel 633, and dates it to 1884. The Hungarian Wikipedia article on Cseszte and the German Wikipedia article on Častá also give 1884 as the year the synagogue was built. Elek Fényes's gazetteer of the mid-nineteenth century already lists a synagogue in the village, so the 1884 building probably replaced an older house of prayer, although no source read describes it.

No photograph, plan or description of the 1884 building was found. According to the KPÚ survey it ceased to exist some time after 1953, and a private family house now occupies the site. Its architect, size and appearance are unknown.

מיקום

Where it stood for 69 years

Historic: Hlavná ulica (Main Street), conscription no. 447, orientation no. 189, parcel 633, Častá (Cseszte), Pozsony county. Today: Hlavná 447/189, 900 89 Častá, Pezinok district, Bratislava region; a private family house on the former synagogue plot (exact to the plot).

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הקהילה היהודית

Jews lived in Častá on the estate of the Pálffy counts, whose seat was the castle of Červený Kameň above the village. A 2022 survey of Jewish cemeteries in the Bratislava region by Peter Werner and Maroš Borský records that the community numbered about ten families in 1767 and that 270 Jews lived in Častá in 1828. Elek Fényes's gazetteer, quoted in the Hungarian Wikipedia article on Cseszte, likewise describes the market town as having 1,387 Catholics and 270 Jews, with a Catholic parish church and a synagogue. The KehilaLinks site for Častá states that Jewish families lived there from the 1600s or 1700s into the twentieth century and that their history was closely tied to the trading activities of the castle's owners; the German Wikipedia article speaks of a sizeable Jewish minority from about 1600 until the end of the Second World War. The older cemetery near the castle served the early community; a newer cemetery with about a hundred marked graves was opened in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the old one was full. Figures for the community in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not found.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

No photograph, drawing, plan or written description of the Častá synagogue has been found, so its architecture is unknown. The only firm facts come from the 2022 KPÚ Bratislava survey: the building stood on Hlavná ulica, the main street of the village, as house 447/189 on parcel 633, and it is dated to 1884. Its position on the main street suggests a building that was visible in the village rather than hidden in a courtyard, but its size, materials, style, roof form, seating arrangement and whether it had a women's gallery are not recorded in any source read. A colour postcard of Častá from 1902 reproduced on the KehilaLinks site shows the castle, a chapel, the Catholic church with its school and parsonage and a general view of the village, but the synagogue cannot be identified on it. The architect and builder are unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

Almost nothing is recorded about religious life in the 1884 synagogue. No rabbi, cantor, teacher or community officer of Častá has been identified in the sources read, and the community's affiliation (Orthodox, Neolog or Status Quo) is not stated in them. The synagogue was the last of at least two houses of prayer in the village, since a synagogue already existed when Fényes compiled his gazetteer in the mid-nineteenth century. The community also maintained two burial grounds. The older one, near the castle, still holds about twenty stones, mostly fragments with simple Hebrew inscriptions; six of them now lean beside the entrance to the castle cellar and others are kept in the castle depository. The newer cemetery at the edge of the village has about a hundred marked graves. The entry on Častá in Pinkas Hakehillot Slovakia (2003), page 483, which would probably describe the congregation's institutions, is not available in English translation online and was not read.

הרס

No source found records damage to the synagogue during the Second World War. The 2022 KPÚ Bratislava survey of lost synagogues, which draws on the published inventories of Eugen Bárkány, Bárkány and Ľudovít Dojč, Róbert Büchler and Maroš Borský and on unpublished surveys by Martin Melicherčík (1993) and Viktor Ferus (1995), describes the building's present state as 'ceased to exist after 1953', with a private family house now standing on the site. This means the synagogue survived the Holocaust and stood empty or in other use into the 1950s, the early years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, before it was removed. The exact year, the reason for the demolition, and who ordered or carried it out are not recorded in any source read; it is also not known whether the building was first sold to a private owner, as happened to many former synagogues in Slovakia. The Slovak online inventory of lost synagogues, synagogyslovenska.sk, lists the '1884 synagogue' of Častá but leaves its fate open.

גורל הקהילה

Under the wartime Slovak State the Jews of Slovakia were stripped of their civil rights and property, and in 1942 nearly 58,000 of them were deported, most to Nazi death camps, where most were murdered. The SHALOM guide to Jewish heritage in Slovakia gives these figures for the country as a whole. No source read gives the number of Jews living in Častá in 1938 or 1942, the date on which they were deported, or where they were sent. The KehilaLinks site for Častá directs readers to Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names, which records victims who were born in or lived in Častá, but the names were not counted in this research. The German Wikipedia article states that the Jewish minority lived in Častá until the end of the Second World War; no organised Jewish community is recorded afterwards, and the KPÚ survey notes that the Častá cemetery plots are not owned by the Jewish community today. Survivors and their later lives are unknown.

האתר כיום

A private family house now stands on the synagogue's plot at Hlavná 189 (conscription number 447, parcel 633), according to the KPÚ Bratislava survey; no visible trace of the synagogue is recorded. Both Jewish cemeteries survive. The older one, near Červený Kameň Castle and the car park at the start of the forest educational trail, is an irregular plot about 45 metres long with traces of its stone wall. The newer cemetery south-east of the village, beside a farm, is overgrown with trees and is maintained by a local civic association led by Adam Herceg, which has put up an entrance structure, a bench and an information panel and is gradually re-erecting fallen stones. The map pin marks the house now on the synagogue plot.

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