Old Synagogue of Česká Lípa

Die jüdische Gemeinde

The first written records of Jews in Česká Lípa date from the 1520s, and from about 1570 the community can be followed reliably, with fourteen and a half taxpaying households at that time. Under Rudolf II it acquired the usual institutions: a ritual bath, a cemetery outside the walls, a prayer room and a school. The Jewish quarter grew from the corner of Grabengasse and Kreuzgasse outside the eastern walls and eventually reached the bank of the Ploučnice (Polzen). In 1724 it had 15 houses and 358 people in 73 families. In December 1744, during the War of the Austrian Succession, hussars and pandurs of the Austrian army plundered the quarter; more than 30 Jews, the rabbi among them, were killed and about 40 wounded, and a special penitential prayer was said each year on the anniversary. The quarter was extended when the town was rebuilt after the 1820 fire. By about 1850 the community had some 130 families and was, after the Germans, the second largest group in the town; after 1848 the chains that had closed the quarter at night were removed.

Architektur und Gestaltung

No view of the exterior has been found, and the architect, the builder and the style are unknown. German Wikipedia, following Alicke, says an earlier prayer house was apparently of wood. What is known of the eighteenth-century synagogue comes from written sources and one drawing. The building had a cellar in which the ritual bath was housed. After the fire of 1820 the ground-floor prayer hall was enlarged but kept its traditional plan. An undated seating plan in the town archive of Česká Lípa shows a rectangular men's synagogue with the Ark, labelled 'Altar', in the middle of one long side and a large central reading platform labelled 'Vorlesungs Altar', with numbered benches along the walls and around the platform and the holders' names written in. The entrance is in the opposite wall. A lattice, labelled 'Frauen Gitter', separates a lower women's synagogue at one end, and a women's gallery runs along two sides. The total capacity was about 260 seats.

Leben in der Synagoge

The building served as the congregation's house of prayer for more than a century and also housed its ritual bath. Before the synagogue existed, the earlier community house had combined living quarters for the rabbi and the beadle with rooms for prayer and a Hebrew school; whether the synagogue kept any of these uses is unknown. The seating plan records that individual seats belonged to named members, as was usual in Bohemian congregations. In the decades after the 1820 rebuilding the reform movement changed services in Česká Lípa: sermons in German and choral singing were introduced, and the old orthodox interior, with its central platform and screened women's section, came to be seen as unsuitable. Daniel Ehrmann, a writer and scholar who later edited the periodical Das Abendland, was rabbi in the 1850s and preached in this building until he resigned in 1860. In 1857 the members formed a committee for a new synagogue and sought advice from Roudnice nad Labem, which had recently built one. The names of earlier rabbis and cantors who served here were not found.

Zerstörung

The building suffered twice before its end. During the plunder of the Jewish quarter in December 1744 the synagogue was badly damaged, according to German Wikipedia, and in 1820 a fire that destroyed much of the town also left it heavily damaged. It was repaired and enlarged after the fire and remained in use for more than forty years. Its final removal was not an act of violence. The congregation, which had grown and adopted a reformed service, decided in 1857 to build a new and more representative synagogue. German Wikipedia and the 2025 thesis by Barbara Janu state that the old building was demolished in 1863, and the foundation stone of its successor, designed by Josef Goldbach and built under Eduard Posselt, was laid on its site on 17 April 1863. No source describes the demolition itself, who carried it out or whether any part of the old building was reused. The new synagogue was set on fire in November 1938; it has its own entry.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

The congregation that built the old synagogue continued in the new one from 1864. Its numbers fell from 686 in 1880 to 301 in 1930, about 2.7 per cent of the town. When Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland in October 1938, most Jews of Česká Lípa fled into the interior of Czechoslovakia; Jewish property was confiscated, the new synagogue was burned by the Nazis on 11 November 1938, its street was renamed Stürmergasse, and the community was formally dissolved in September 1939. The last rabbi, Dr Bernhard Wolff, took Torah scrolls and other synagogue objects to Roudnice nad Labem; he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940, held in Dachau and killed in the Bernburg euthanasia centre in 1942. From 1942 the remaining Jews were deported to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz. Yad Vashem counts more than 225 former Jewish residents of the town among the victims of the Shoah. A small congregation founded in 1959 by Jews from Subcarpathian Ruthenia did not last.

Der Ort heute

Nothing of the old synagogue survives. Its site was taken by the synagogue of 1863-64, which was burned in 1938 and whose ruin was later cleared. The houses of the former Jewish quarter around it were demolished in the 1980s, when a new road was laid through the area. The lane where both synagogues stood, formerly Tempelgasse, is now called U Synagogy ('At the Synagogue'), and the site lies in greenery beside a car park east of the historic centre. A memorial to the destroyed synagogue and a monument to the Jewish ghetto stand nearby. The old Jewish cemetery, restored in the 1990s, is the main surviving trace of the community.

Bedeutende Namen