Csók utca Synagogue, Debrecen

PANORAMICA

La storia di Csók utca Synagogue, Debrecen

Debrecen, the main city of the Hungarian Great Plain, had one of the largest Jewish communities in eastern Hungary. Jews received official permission to live in the city in 1840 and formed an organised community in the early 1850s. The community declared itself Status Quo in 1870, and a separate Orthodox community was formed in 1886. Besides the monumental Great Synagogue of 1895-1897 on Deák Ferenc utca, which burned in 1948 and was demolished in 1962, the city had an Orthodox synagogue on Pásti utca and the Status Quo synagogue on Kápolnási utca of 1909-1910; both still stand. Gazda's survey of 1980-87, which records 9,142 Jews in Debrecen in 1941, lists several further houses of worship in the city, among them a synagogue at Csók utca 6-8, which she marks as demolished, and a separate prayer room at Csók utca 2. Gazda gives no date for the synagogue's construction or demolition, and no photograph, plan or description of it has been found. Which congregation used it, and whether it was among the three synagogues that a JewishGen local-history page says were built in the early 1920s, is unknown.

POSIZIONE

Where it stood

Historic: Csók utca 6-8, Debrecen. Today: Nagy Imre utca (recorded in OpenStreetMap as the former Csók utca), Belváros, 4026 Debrecen; plot not identified, pin at the street midpoint (approximate).

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La comunità ebraica

The Jewish Virtual Library gives Debrecen's Jewish population as 118 in 1848, 544 in 1856, 6,200 in 1900, 10,170 in 1920 and about 12,000 in 1940; Gazda's survey of 1980-87 records 9,142 Jews in 1941. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 dates the founding of the community to 1852, its burial society to 1856, and its first purpose-built temple, with 200 seats, to 1875; the domed Great Synagogue followed in 1895-1896 to plans by the architect Jakab Gärtner. In 1870 the community declared itself Status Quo, and in 1886 the Orthodox formed a separate community, which built its own synagogue on Pásti utca; the Status Quo congregation consecrated a new synagogue on Kápolnási utca in 1910. A Jewish secondary school opened in 1921. Gazda's table shows that the city also had smaller houses of prayer in Hatvan utca and Kórház utca and prayer rooms in several other streets. The congregation of the Csók utca synagogue, its founders, officers and rabbis are unknown, and it has not been possible to say whether it belonged to the Orthodox or the Status Quo community.

Architettura e design

Nothing is known of the building's architecture. No photograph, postcard, drawing, plan or written description of the Csók utca synagogue has been found. The photographs of a Debrecen synagogue held by the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, including postcards captioned as having burned in 1948, show the domed Great Synagogue on Deák Ferenc utca, not this building. Gazda's survey of 1980-87 gives the address as Csók utca 6-8, a double plot, and classes the building as a synagogue rather than a prayer house or prayer room, the categories she uses for the city's smaller places of worship, including a prayer room further down the same street at no. 2. She records no build date, size or style for it. The architect, the builder, the seating capacity, the materials and the layout of the interior are therefore all unknown.

La vita nella sinagoga

No record of religious life in the Csók utca synagogue has been found. It is not known whether its congregation followed the Orthodox rite of the community that broke away in 1886 or belonged to the Status Quo community, nor who led its services. In the interwar years Debrecen's Jewish life included Orthodox and Status Quo rabbinates, a Jewish secondary school founded in 1921, a Jewish hospital and a community centre, and its rabbis included Binyamin Zeev Krausz of the Status Quo community, who died in 1921, and Shmuel Schlesinger, who died in 1937. None of the sources read ties any of them to the Csók utca building. No source says whom this house of prayer served, which part of the city its worshippers came from, or how many seats it had, so its religious character remains unknown.

Distruzione

No source found records what happened to the Csók utca synagogue or when it was lost. Its worshippers were deported in the summer of 1944, and nothing is known of the building after that date. The city's Great Synagogue was damaged in the war, burned in 1948 and was pulled down by the town administration in 1962, but no source connects the smaller building on Csók utca with any of these events. The only evidence that it is gone is Anikó Gazda's gazetteer, whose site survey of 1980-1987 records it as demolished. She gives no date and names nobody. Who demolished the building, whether it was first sold by the surviving community, and whether it was destroyed in the war or pulled down later under Communist rule are not recorded. The year of loss can therefore only be given as before the survey.

Il destino della comunità

After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Jews of Debrecen were confined and then deported by the Hungarian authorities. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, about 7,500 people were deported up to 26-28 June 1944. Some were taken to Auschwitz; others were sent to Austria because bombing had cut the railway lines. Before this, young Jewish men had been taken into forced labour service, and several hundred of them were burned to death in the hospital at Dorosics. How many of the worshippers of the Csók utca synagogue were among the victims is unknown. Survivors who returned formed the largest Jewish community in the region, 4,640 people in 1946, and in 1970 about 1,200 Jews still lived in Debrecen with rabbis and two synagogues, the buildings on Pásti utca and Kápolnási utca. The community has since become small and elderly.

Il luogo oggi

Gazda gives the address as Csók utca 6-8, but the plot has not been identified on the modern map, so it is not known what stands there today. OpenStreetMap records Csók utca as a former name of the present Nagy Imre utca in Debrecen's Belváros (city centre) district, and the map pin for this entry marks the midpoint of that street, not the building. No surviving fragment and no marker on the site is recorded in any source read. The two Debrecen synagogues that survive, on Pásti utca and Kápolnási utca, lie in the same inner-city district. Fixing the address will need the city's historical address directories or cadastral maps, or the local-history collections of the Déri Museum or the Hajdú-Bihar County Archives.

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