Csabrendek Synagogue

The Jewish community

When the first Jews came to Csabrendek is not known. The village's local-history site says the community existed from 1635, a date that sits oddly with its own account of resettlement after the Ottoman wars and could not be checked. The site explains the growth by ownership: the village was divided among several lesser noble families instead of one lord, while Sümeg was a bishop's estate closed to Jews and Devecser belonged to the Esterházys. By the Reform Era local trade was in Jewish hands. Gazda's survey gives 421 Jews in 1828 and 534 in 1851; Elek Fényes's 1851 gazetteer, quoted locally, also has 534, beside 2,400 Catholics. In February 1828 the Jews of Csabrendek petitioned Zala county for a fair assessment of their toleration tax, and that July the estate lawyer József Oszterhueber submitted a draft statute for the Rendek Jewish community to the manorial court. Numbers then fell as families moved away or emigrated to America: 242 in 1910 and about two per cent of 3,407 inhabitants in 1934. Presidents named include Dávid Weiszfeld (1836-1848), Mór Weisz (1886), Ignác Reich (1889), Vilmos Böhm (1892, 1895), Sámuel Rabinek (1912), Sándor Rabinek (1918) and Vilmos Kohn (1944).

Architecture and design

No published description of the building was found, so this account rests on the museum photographs. The synagogue was a tall, compact, rendered block under a steep hipped roof of shingles or flat tiles. Its entrance front had two levels: a plain ground floor with a central doorway under a small gabled porch and a shuttered window beside it, and above it an open loggia of five round arches on six plain columns, one bay deep, with a further arch on the visible side. A central arched opening pierced the wall behind the loggia, and the side wall had round-headed windows. Inside, the hall was vaulted, with lunettes cutting into the vault above three round-headed windows in the east wall. Pilasters between the windows ended in painted crowned cartouches, and the vaults carried painted panels, rosettes, scrollwork and bands of Hebrew lettering. One lunette held a landscape with a mountain and an inscribed tablet in a scrolled frame. The Torah ark had paired columns and a broken pediment with finials, and a gallery with a turned balustrade ran along the side. The style label is a reading of these photographs, not a sourced classification. Architect and capacity are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

The synagogue was the seat of a district rabbinate. The village's local-history compilation names the rabbis: Dávid Weiszfeld (to 1833), Ábrahám Freider or Freunder (1835-1848), Dr Izsák Weisz (1872-1876), Imre Fischer (1880), Zsigmond Brüchler (1885-1886) and Salamon Müller (1889-1890); after five years without a rabbi came Dr Sándor Winkler, who served twenty-nine years (1895-1924), then Adolf Klein (1929-1939) and Béla Gottselig (1941-1944). Cantors recorded are József Goldstein (1898), Mór Grünwald (1902) and Vilmos Funk (1902-1907). A Jewish school was founded in the first half of the 1830s, and the same source says it had nine teachers in 1859. One was Adolf Weiszfeld, father of the politician Vilmos Vázsonyi and of Jenő Vázsonyi, later president of the Hungarian State Railways. Other teachers were Ignác Lőb, who became director of the village savings cooperative, and Soma Hirschler, who reported on Csabrendek for the regional newspapers. After the First World War the congregation followed the Neolog trend. An undated museum photograph shows an elderly man in the synagogue doorway holding a pair of Torah finials and a Torah shield.

Destruction

The record of the congregation ends in 1944, the year of its last rabbi's final term and of the last burials in its cemetery. What happened to the synagogue afterwards is known only from photographs in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives. An album page captioned 'Csabrendek, templom, 1949' shows the building still standing but derelict: pieces of the roof covering missing, the arched opening behind the loggia broken through, and inside, a ragged hole in the brickwork of the east wall where the Torah ark had stood, though the painted vaults were still largely intact. Undated photographs in the same collection, which must be earlier, show the ark and the gallery in place. Who stripped the interior is not recorded in any source read. When Anikó Gazda surveyed Hungarian synagogue sites in 1980-87 she recorded the Csabrendek synagogue as demolished. The building was therefore pulled down at some point between 1949 and the 1980s, under Communist rule. No source found gives the year, says who ordered or carried out the demolition, or whether the building had first been sold.

The community’s fate

Gazda's table gives no figure for 1941. The local-history site puts the Jewish share at about two per cent of 3,407 inhabitants in 1934, which would be roughly seventy people; that is a calculation, not a count. Béla Gottselig was rabbi from 1941 and Vilmos Kohn was president in 1944. No source read in this research describes the removal of the Jews of Csabrendek itself. The village adjoins Sümeg, and the Pinkas Hakehillot entry for Zalaegerszeg records that in 1944, after the Jews of that town were moved into a ghetto in May, Jews from Keszthely, Tapolca, Zalaszentgrót, Zalabér, Sümeg, Lenti and Türje were added to them. Hungarian gendarmes tortured prisoners to make them reveal hidden valuables, and on 4 July they were loaded into sealed railway cars, seventy to eighty people to a car, and sent to the Nazi German camp at Auschwitz; that transport is estimated at 1,200 people. It is likely, but not confirmed, that the Csabrendek families went the same way. Burials in the Jewish cemetery stopped in 1944. The number of victims and survivors is unknown, and no community is recorded after the war.

The site today

The local-history site of Csabrendek says the synagogue stood in what is now Magyar utca, but gives no house number, and no source read identifies the plot or what occupies it today. The map pin therefore marks the midpoint of Magyar utca, not the building's footprint. No marker on the site is recorded. The Jewish cemetery survives south-west of the village on the north-western slope of Rendeki-hegy: a walled enclosure among pines with about 200 gravestones, the earliest dated 1823/24. Most of its marble and granite stones have been toppled or carried off, and a 2020 study listed it among three Hungarian Jewish cemeteries in very poor condition. The municipality has cleared it, pupils of the Lauder Javne School in Budapest worked there in 2016 and 2018, and the stone wall has been almost completely rebuilt.

Notable names