Historia Celldömölk Orthodox Synagogue
Celldömölk, in the north-east of Vas county, took its present form in the early twentieth century, when the market town of Kiscell was joined with neighbouring Nemesdömölk. Its Jewish community, independent since 1870, had consecrated a large Neolog synagogue designed by the Viennese architect Ludwig Schöne in 1882; that building has its own entry. Around 1900 the Neolog congregation introduced an organ and added a gallery to its synagogue. Members who held to traditional practice objected, and in 1902 they left to found a separate Orthodox community.
This entry covers the house of worship that the Orthodox congregation then built for itself. JewishGen's KehilaLinks page for the town and the Scholem and Friends history of Vas county Jewry date it to 1908 and describe it only as small; Anikó Gazda's survey of Hungarian synagogues also gives 1908, while a 2010 newspaper report based on a 1955 rabbinical survey says it was consecrated in 1911. The two congregations kept a shared school and cemetery. No photograph, plan, street address or description of the building has been found, and no rabbi or officer of the Orthodox congregation is named in the sources read. The synagogue had disappeared by August 1955, and Gazda's survey of 1980-87 likewise found it demolished.
Where it stood for nearly 45 years
Historic address unknown; Celldömölk, Vas county, Hungary. Pin is the town centre (approximate), not the synagogue site.
Otwórz większą mapę →Społeczność żydowska
Jews settled in Kiscell from the middle of the nineteenth century. The community became independent in 1870, and in 1877 Kiscell and Pórdömölk together had 196 Jewish inhabitants. The dispute that divided it began around 1900, when the Neolog majority installed an organ and built a gallery in the 1882 synagogue. In 1902 the discontented traditionalists formed their own Orthodox community. According to KehilaLinks the two groups remained linked in practice: the Orthodox built their own small synagogue in 1908, but the Jewish school and the cemetery stayed in common use. The Orthodox congregation appears to have grown into the larger of the two. The April 1944 census of Jewish communities, as quoted by KehilaLinks, counted 214 people in the Neolog mother community and 285 members in the Orthodox one; both figures likely include Jews of surrounding villages attached to each congregation. In 1919 the community suffered a pogrom, in which a mob attacked eleven Jews and murdered five. The names of the Orthodox congregation's rabbis, cantors and presidents have not been found.
Architektura i projekt
Almost nothing is known about the building's appearance. The two sources that describe it, KehilaLinks and the Scholem and Friends page on Vas county Jewry, call it only a small synagogue, built for the Orthodox congregation in 1908. The 2010 Népszabadság article by Gábor Czene, summarising a 1955 survey by two rabbinical students, refers to it as the Orthodox Jewish temple consecrated in 1911, which suggests construction lasted from 1908 until about 1911, or that the building was completed in stages. No architect is named. Its interior arrangement, seating and women's section are not described in any source read. The large Moorish Revival Neolog synagogue of 1882 stood in the same town and is documented by photographs; no photograph identified as the Orthodox building has been found in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, whose Celldömölk photographs all show the 1882 synagogue.
Życie w synagodze
No source read describes services or communal life inside the Orthodox synagogue. What is known comes from the circumstances of its founding. Its congregation had left the Neolog community because of the organ and the gallery added to the 1882 synagogue, so worship here followed traditional Orthodox practice without instrumental music. The congregation organised itself as a separate community from 1902 and kept its own register of members, which by April 1944 listed 285 people. It did not have its own school or cemetery: according to KehilaLinks the Jewish school and the burial ground remained shared with the Neolog congregation, so children of both communities were taught together and the dead of both were buried side by side. The names of rabbis, cantors, ritual slaughterers and lay leaders who served the Orthodox synagogue could not be found today; the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 and Pinkas Hakehillot Hungary, which might name them, could not be read.
Zniszczenie
No source read records when the Orthodox synagogue was destroyed or who removed it. The building stood empty after the deportation of its congregation in 1944. Local testimony collected by the historian András Czirók, as reported in the entry on the town's main synagogue, holds that Nazi German troops used the Neolog synagogue and the Jewish school as an ammunition store and blew them up; that account is not known to concern the Orthodox building. In August 1955 the rabbinical students István Löwinger and Kornél Schmelzer surveyed the synagogues of Transdanubia for Sándor Scheiber, director of the National Rabbinical Seminary. As summarised by Gábor Czene in Népszabadság in 2010, their report listed Celldömölk among eight places where no synagogue was left, and stated that both the Neolog synagogue of 1882 and the Orthodox synagogue consecrated in 1911 had been bulldozed. Whether the Orthodox building was lost to wartime damage or pulled down between 1945 and 1955, and by whom, is not recorded.
Los społeczności
In the spring of 1944, after the Nazi German occupation of Hungary, the Jews of Celldömölk were rounded up. KehilaLinks and the Scholem and Friends history state that altogether 394 Jews of Celldömölk were taken to the ghetto at Jánosháza, from where they were deported in the summer of 1944. Their onward destination and the number who survived are not stated in the sources read. Members of both the Orthodox and the Neolog congregations shared this fate, and from 1944 the Orthodox synagogue stood empty. After the war the few survivors no longer formed two communities. A single mixed community of Neolog and Orthodox Jews was founded, counting 81 people. It did not reopen either synagogue; its last prayer hall was in a building on Szentháromság tér, which still stands. The two Jewish cemeteries were desecrated several times during and after the war, including in 1964, 1966 and 1970. The precise number of Orthodox members murdered is unknown.
Miejsce dzisiaj
Nothing of the Orthodox synagogue survives. Its location in Celldömölk has not been established: no source read gives its street or plot, so the map pin marks only the centre of the town and should not be taken as the site. The building was gone by August 1955, when a survey of Transdanubian synagogues found no synagogue left in the town, and Anikó Gazda's survey of 1980-87 also recorded it as demolished. The postwar community's prayer hall on Szentháromság tér is a different building. Locating the synagogue would require an early twentieth-century cadastral map of Celldömölk or the files of the Orthodox community.
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