Chodová Planá Synagogue

Społeczność żydowska

According to the JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project, Jews are recorded in Chodová Planá and its neighbourhood from 1570, with an organised community from 1620. An expulsion ordered in 1681 was cancelled. Jüdische Gemeinden writes that towards the end of the seventeenth century the Count of Haimhausen granted protection to Jewish refugees; the Jewish Community of Prague's monuments database adds that Jews expelled from nearby Planá settled here after 1686 and were allowed a burial ground. Twenty-two families lived in the town in 1736 and thirty-two families occupied twelve houses in 1767; Jüdische Gemeinden gives more than twenty families about 1740 and more than thirty about 1770, living in a quarter of their own. The community kept a pinkas, a record book compiled in 1756 and published by S. Ochser in 1910. Numbers stood at 35 families in 1818 and 230 people in 1910, but the second half of the nineteenth century saw many families move to larger towns. By 1930 only 14 Jews were counted, and the Cemetery Discovery Project gives three in 1932, with eighteen more in nearby Planá. The town shared much of its history with the neighbouring Jewish village of Drmoul (Dürrmaul).

Architektura i projekt

Very little is recorded about the building itself. Every source consulted describes it simply as a Baroque synagogue, built in the middle of the eighteenth century to replace the synagogue first mentioned in 1645: about 1750 according to Jüdische Gemeinden, 1759 according to the JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project, and 'from the middle of the eighteenth century' in Jiří Fiedler's gazetteer. It stood within the Jewish quarter, where in 1767 thirty-two families shared twelve houses, and Fiedler still noted a Jewish street in the town. A historical photograph of the synagogue was published by Fiedler in 2008 and is reproduced on the Jüdische Gemeinden page for Dürrmaul and Kuttenplan, but its host site could not be opened, so the exterior cannot be described here. The architect, builder, dimensions, seating capacity and the layout of the prayer hall, women's gallery and Torah ark are all unknown. The fact that the building could be used as a stable during the Second World War suggests a plain, open hall, but this is an inference rather than a documented fact.

Życie w synagodze

The synagogue was the religious centre of a rural Bohemian congregation that kept its own rabbi for long periods. The Cemetery Discovery Project names Abraham Broda as rabbi between 1690 and 1693, before the Baroque building was erected, when services were still held in the older synagogue. In the nineteenth century the congregation's fortunes were tied to its lord, Count Cajetan of Berchem-Haimhausen (1795-1863). In 1843 he created an endowment to pay for a rabbi 'of a modern school of thought with opinions on reform suited to our age', which allowed the community to employ a full-time rabbi, and in 1861 he set up a fund for the Jewish poor. In gratitude the congregation placed a memorial tablet to the Haimhausen family inside the synagogue. The names of the rabbis who served under the 1843 endowment, the cantors and the communal officers were not found in the sources consulted. The community buried its dead first in the old cemetery on the Kellerberg, with stones from 1735, and from 1890 in a new cemetery.

Zniszczenie

No source consulted records damage to the synagogue in November 1938, when the region was annexed to Nazi Germany and the neighbouring Drmoul synagogue was burned by the Nazis. By then the Chodová Planá congregation had all but ceased to exist. Jüdische Gemeinden states that during the Second World War the synagogue building was used as a stable, without saying who used it or on whose orders; under Nazi German rule of the Sudetenland the property of Jewish communities was seized, but no source names the owner of this building in those years. The building survived the war. Jüdische Gemeinden says only that it was 'later demolished'. Jiří Fiedler's gazetteer, first published in 1991, is more precise: the synagogue from the middle of the eighteenth century was demolished after 1960, which places its destruction in the period of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Who ordered or carried out the demolition, and the exact year, are not recorded in any source found.

Los społeczności

The Jewish community of Chodová Planá had largely dissolved through emigration to the cities well before the Nazi era: 14 Jews were counted in 1930, and the JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project gives only three in 1932. In the autumn of 1938 the town, part of the German-speaking border region, was annexed to Nazi Germany under the Munich Agreement. Jews in the Sudetenland either fled into what remained of Czechoslovakia during the crisis or were driven out after the annexation; the Jews of neighbouring Drmoul left during the Sudeten crisis. The European Jewish heritage guide says that after the 1938 annexation the community was decimated. The new Jewish cemetery was vandalised, probably in 1938 by the Nazis. The individual fates of the last Jewish residents of Chodová Planá, including whether any were later deported from the Protectorate and murdered, were not found in the sources consulted. No Jewish community was re-established in the town after 1945.

Miejsce dzisiaj

The synagogue's plot has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what stands there now. Jiří Fiedler noted that the town's Jewish street survived after the synagogue was pulled down, and the building presumably stood in or near it, but the street's present name was not confirmed. The map pin for this entry marks the centre of Chodová Planá and should not be read as the synagogue's location. Two Jewish cemeteries remain: the old one in the former castle park, about 700 metres north of the new cemetery, with around a hundred gravestones from 1735 onwards, restored in 2001-2003 by the Czech-German volunteer organisation Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste, and the new cemetery opened in 1890.

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