Orthodox Synagogue of Csorna

Die jüdische Gemeinde

Jews are recorded in Csorna from the eighteenth century, when they settled under the protection of the Esterházy estate; a count of 1785 found 29. Numbers stayed small until the 1840s and then rose quickly as the railways made the town a trading centre: 152 in 1853, 512 in 1880, 748 in 1910 and 836 in 1920. The community was organised in 1853 with Sámuel Gestetner as its first president and Náthán Freuder as its first rabbi. A prayer house was opened that year and the synagogue was built in 1854, according to the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon from the congregation's own resources. A primary school teaching in Hungarian opened in the same year. After the split in Hungarian Jewry that followed the Congress of 1868–69 the community belonged to the Orthodox organisation, and its rabbi kept the registers for the Jews of the surrounding villages as well. Most members were shopkeepers, grain, livestock and timber merchants and craftsmen, and Jewish owners ran a steam mill, a brickworks and a distillery. David Gestetner, inventor of the stencil duplicator, was born into the community in the early 1850s.

Architektur und Gestaltung

No architect or builder is recorded, and no plans or interior views have been found. The one known photograph shows a compact, free-standing, two-storey rendered building under a hipped roof, in the round-arched Romantic manner common among Hungarian synagogues of the mid-nineteenth century; how much of what it shows dates from 1854 and how much from the enlargement of 1884 is Unknown. The entrance front had a projecting centre bay ending in a gable trimmed with an arched corbel frieze and crowned by a finial that appears to be the Tablets of the Law. A tall round-arched window stood above the main door, which had a semicircular fanlight. The bay on either side had a round window above a round-arched opening, and the corners were treated as slender turret-like piers carrying small domed caps with finials. A memory plan drawn by the local historian Endre Berecz shows an oblong building with stepped projections at both ends, set lengthwise in the yard parallel to Eötvös utca with its entrance front towards József tér. The seating capacity and the arrangement of the women's gallery are Unknown.

Leben in der Synagoge

The synagogue was the temple of the Csorna Autonomous Orthodox Israelite Community. Around it in the yard stood the rabbi's house and office, the primary school (opened in 1854 and kept up until 1944, with 84 pupils in its last year), a small prayer house called Etz Chaim, a room for boys' religious instruction, the mikveh, the slaughterhouse and the shochet's flat, a matzah bakery, the community office and a hall used by the Chevra Kadisha; kosher butchers' shops faced Eötvös utca. A Talmud Torah was founded in 1883 and the burial society opened the town's Jewish cemetery in 1885. In 1929 the community counted 910 people in 197 families, with a women's society, a 'penny' charity, a Bikur Cholim society and a library of 5,000 to 6,000 volumes. Rabbi Farkas Kohn, known in Hebrew as Zeev Wolf Kahana, led the congregation for many years, and its Machzikei Hadas association published a Hungarian-language handbook of the laws of Jewish married life in 1920. In September 1937 a burglar stole all the synagogue's ritual silver; the police arrested a suspect in Pápa.

Zerstörung

No source consulted reports that the synagogue was burned or wrecked in 1944, although the ghetto was laid out around it and Jewish property in the town was inventoried and, according to a contemporary witness, widely plundered. The building outlived its congregation. An undated photograph, which Endre Berecz describes as showing its fairly ruinous state in the 1950s, has bricks and timber stacked in front of it. A regional newspaper states that a joinery workshop operated in the building, and Anikó Gazda's survey of 1980–87 recorded it at Mártírok tere 3 as a warehouse that had lost its religious character. According to Berecz it was sold, 'in the complete absence of worshippers', and demolished in the 1980s, the last decade of Communist rule in Hungary. Whether the Communist local council, a state enterprise or another owner had it pulled down is not recorded in the sources consulted; nor are the seller, the buyer or the exact year.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944 the Hungarian authorities registered Csorna's Jews, about 785 people in April, and on 11–12 May confined them, together with Jews from the villages of the district, in a ghetto of two parts: the block around the synagogue and workers' housing at the brickworks. Between 850 and 900 people were held there under a Jewish Council led by József Rübner. In June (on the 18th by one account, on the 21st according to Berecz) Hungarian gendarmes marched them to the railway station. They were taken to Sopron and Sárvár and deported from there to Auschwitz, the Sopron transport arriving on 5 July. Berecz's lists name roughly 640 dead from the town, about four in five, among them Rabbi Lipót Haberfeld and his family. Ninety-seven Jews lived in Csorna in 1947 and about 70 in 1955. In November 1956 Jewish families gathered in the synagogue yard before leaving for the West, and a local pastor noted that only 13 or 14 were said to remain. By 2000 two Jews lived in the town.

Der Ort heute

The former temple yard has been completely built over. On the corner of Mártírok tere ('Martyrs' Square', the former József tér) and Eötvös József utca stands a multi-storey block of flats with shops and a café on the ground floor and a small turret at the corner. It was already there when Berecz's book appeared in 2006; its construction date is Unknown. A small black marble plaque on its wall records that the temple of the Orthodox community stood on this spot, and a Holocaust memorial was unveiled on the town's main square in 2005. The Jewish cemetery, opened in 1885, survives with its ceremonial hall. Nothing of the synagogue, the rabbi's house, the school or the other communal buildings remains visible.

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