La historia de Častkov Synagogue
Častkov lies in the Záhorie area of the Trnava region, in the Senica district, close to the border with Moravia; under the Kingdom of Hungary the village belonged to Nyitra county and was known in Hungarian as Császkó (the form given by the English Wikipedia; the form Csasztkó also appears). Its synagogue is known today from a single short statement. The heritage portal Pamiatky na Slovensku, which lists it among the vanished monuments of Slovakia, records after an information board set up in the village in May 2020 that only a remnant of a wall survives of the synagogue that stood at the back of the yard of house no. 112. The portal gives no date of construction and no date of loss, and no description of the building.
The village's own website, cited by the portal as its bibliography, says nothing about Jews or a synagogue in its history page, which concentrates on the Evangelical church whose foundation stone was laid on 8 May 1876. Častkov has no entry of its own in the translated table of contents of Pinkas Hakehillot Slovakia, so the size of the congregation, its affiliation and its institutions are unknown. Because a fragment of the synagogue's own masonry still stands while the building itself has gone, it is catalogued here as a destroyed synagogue.
Where it stood
Historic: rear of the yard of house no. 112, Častkov (Hungarian Császkó), former Nyitra county. Present: house no. 112, Častkov, 906 04, Senica district, Trnava region, Slovakia. The pin is on the house no. 112 building in OpenStreetMap; the synagogue stood behind it, so the position is approximate.
Abrir mapa ampliado →La comunidad judía
Almost nothing about the Jewish community of Častkov could be documented in this research. No population figures by religion were found for the village, and no source read gives the date when Jews first settled there, the number of families, their occupations or the names of their leaders. Častkov does not appear as a separate community in the index of Pinkas Hakehillot Slovakia, the standard encyclopedia of Slovak Jewish communities, so whether its Jews formed an independent community or were attached to a larger neighbouring one is unknown; the entry for Senica, the district town, has not been translated online and could not be checked. The very existence of a separate synagogue building in the yard of a village house does show that there was once a congregation large enough, or determined enough, to maintain its own place of worship rather than travelling to a neighbouring town for services. Whether that congregation was Orthodox or belonged to another trend of Hungarian Jewry is unknown.
Arquitectura y diseño
No photograph, drawing, plan or description of the Častkov synagogue was found. The only physical information comes from the statement on the village information board, as reported by Pamiatky na Slovensku: the synagogue stood in the rear part of the yard of house no. 112, and a remnant of one of its walls survives there. Whether the house in front belonged to a Jewish family or to the community, and whether the synagogue was a free-standing hall or an outbuilding attached to other structures, is not documented. The building material of the surviving fragment, the original size and height of the hall, the form of its roof, the arrangement of the windows and the presence or absence of a women's gallery are all unknown. Its architect, builder and seating capacity are likewise unknown, and the style cannot be stated without an image.
La vida dentro de la sinagoga
Nothing is recorded in the sources found about religious life in this synagogue. The names of rabbis, cantors, ritual slaughterers or teachers who may have served the congregation are unknown, and no source mentions a Jewish school, a burial society or a cemetery belonging to Častkov itself. The village's website, which is the only local publication cited for the synagogue, describes the history of the Protestant and Catholic churches but does not mention Jewish worship. It is therefore not known whether the building was used for daily services or only on the Sabbath and festivals, whether it was a community synagogue or a private prayer house kept by one family, and until what year services were held there. The information board that the village set up in 2020 may contain more detail than the one sentence quoted online; its full text has not been published in any source that could be read.
Destrucción
The sources found do not say when the synagogue ceased to be used or when it was pulled down, and none names who demolished it. There is no record of damage to it during the Second World War, no record of a sale or of a demolition order, and no photograph showing it standing after 1945. All that is known is the outcome: at some date before May 2020, when the village set up an information board on the subject, the building had gone, leaving only a remnant of one wall at the back of the yard of house no. 112. Whether it was still standing in 1945, whether it was pulled down deliberately or allowed to fall into ruin, and whether its materials were reused are all unknown; the village board, the municipal chronicle or the land register may settle these questions.
El destino de la comunidad
The fate of the Jews of Častkov is not documented individually in the sources found, and their names and numbers are unknown. Any Jews still living in the village in the early 1940s fell under the anti-Jewish laws of the wartime Slovak State, which stripped Jews of their property through Aryanization; about 10,000 Jewish businesses were liquidated and about 2,300 transferred to non-Jewish owners. Between 25 March and 20 October 1942 almost 58,000 Jews were deported from Slovakia. Members of the Hlinka Guard, its Freiwillige Schutzstaffel and the gendarmerie rounded them up, guarded the transit camps and forced them onto the trains, which went to Auschwitz and to ghettos and camps in the Lublin district; only a few hundred of those deported survived the war. After Nazi German forces occupied Slovakia in August 1944, Einsatzgruppe H and the Hlinka Guard Emergency Divisions deported about 13,500 more Jews and murdered many others. Whether any Jews of Častkov survived and returned is unknown.
El lugar hoy
A remnant of the synagogue's wall survives at the back of the yard of house no. 112 in Častkov; the rest of the building has gone. The plot belongs to the residential house no. 112, which stands in front of it. The heritage portal Pamiatky na Slovensku files the synagogue among Slovakia's vanished monuments rather than among surviving buildings, and none of the sources read mentions any protection, marking or display of the fragment itself. Its height, length and condition are not described in any source read, and no photograph of it was found online. An information board set up in the village in May 2020 records the former synagogue and the surviving wall.
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