Đakovo Synagogue

הקהילה היהודית

A Cultus Verein, the forerunner of the Jewish religious community, was founded in 1852. A burial society followed in 1861. The European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative gives 1852 as the year the community was organised and counts 407 Jews in 1921. Figures collected by JewishGen's Cemetery Discovery Project give 548 in 1925/26, 289 in 1930, 329 in 1931 and 222 in 1937/38; Lelas cites 100 members in 1930, or 548 people with their families, and seventy Jewish children in school. Adolf Kohn, who signed the community statute of 1910, led the congregation for many years; Dr Žiga Neumann was president in 1930 and Josip Frank from 1931 until 1941. The Jewish cemetery, laid out in 1879 beside the municipal cemetery, has about 700 graves and a neo-Romanesque ceremonial hall of the same year. The community's own registers burned with its office in April 1941, which is one reason its history is poorly documented.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

The synagogue was a free-standing building about 28.8 by 16 metres, entered from the west, with a horseshoe-shaped apse at the east end facing Jerusalem. Karač places it among the synagogues of the westwork type, with a pair of towers on the façade finished with octagonal drums and onion-shaped domes. The front was articulated by a large central rose window, triple-light windows and a neo-Romanesque portal; Lelas mentions three portals in all and a Star of David on the gable, and compares the design with the Varaždin synagogue. Construction lasted from 1863 to about 1880, although Lelas also gives 1861 in one passage and the Cemetery Discovery Project gives 1869. The architect is unknown: Karač does not name one, and a manuscript by Dr Mate Horvat naming the builder Franjo Pačer cannot be confirmed. Inside stood a one-manual organ with six stops built by Josef Angster of Pécs in 1910. The seating capacity, galleries and interior decoration are not described in any source read, and no photograph of the building was found in this research.

החיים בבית הכנסת

Lelas describes the rite as Ashkenazi and, as in most synagogues of continental Croatia, largely Reform, and from 1910 services were accompanied by an organ. Its rabbis, as listed by Lelas, were Herman Sommer from 1860 to 1896, Marko Ehrenpreis from 1896 to 1900, Dr Lazar Roth, Dr Schulsinger, who was installed in the synagogue on 19 January 1923, and Dr Izrael Kohn, in office in 1930. Cantors who served here included Josip Weissman, Emanuel Praušer, N. Singer, Jakov Stüssel, Abraham Fingerhut, recorded in 1930, and Eugen Mandl in 1932. A choir sang in the synagogue under Pavo Kemph. The rabbinate and the community office stood next to the synagogue, and it was there that the registers of births, marriages and deaths were kept. The community also supported Jewish schooling, with seventy children counted in 1930. How many seats the hall held and how its services were arranged in detail is not recorded in the sources read.

הרס

On the night of 19 to 20 April 1941, the eve of Hitler's 52nd birthday, which the town's large German community celebrated with ceremony, the synagogue was deliberately set on fire. The organ, the pews and the whole inventory burned, and so did the rabbinate and community office next door, with the community's registers. According to the chronicle of the local volunteer fire brigade cited by Lelas, the firemen were forbidden to fight the blaze and could only protect the neighbouring houses. The damage was put at 1,800,000 dinars. Vladimir Geiger, in his 1996 study of the Germans of Đakovo, reports the claim of the historian Stjepan Brlošić that members of the German national group in Đakovo burned the Jewish house of worship along with books declared harmful; Geiger presents this as Brlošić's assertion. No court or archival record naming individual arsonists was found. The burned shell was then cleared, leaving only fragments of two gate pillars. On 3 December 1943 the empty plot was leased to the Ustaše movement and the Croatian Workers' Union for a workers' hall that was never built.

גורל הקהילה

In April 1941 the Ustaše authorities of the Independent State of Croatia began to strip Đakovo's Jews of their property: by the end of that month the local military command had placed Croat and German commissioners over Jewish shops and businesses. The Cemetery Discovery Project counts 172 Jews in Đakovo in 1941. The European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative says the community of about 200 people was decimated during the war, the men being sent to Jasenovac, and that no Jews remained in Đakovo at the end of the war. Josip Frank, the last president, died in the camps with his wife and two children. From December 1941 to July 1942 a camp for Jewish women and children operated in a mill in the town, run at first by the Osijek Jewish community and from the end of March 1942 by the Ustaše; it held people brought from Sarajevo and Stara Gradiška, about 570 of whom died there, and the remaining 2,400 or so were taken to Jasenovac and murdered. Twenty-two Jews were recorded in Đakovo in 1947, and the community is listed as ended.

האתר כיום

The synagogue stood at what is now Frankopanska ulica 14, cadastral plot 1125. After the war the plot was returned to the Jewish religious community in 1946, passed to general people's property in 1950 under the Communist authorities, and in the 1960s a two-storey block of flats for the Yugoslav People's Army was built on it, which still stands. One source, the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, says the former synagogue was turned into a concert hall; this is contradicted by Karač and by the detailed land-register history in Lelas and appears to confuse Đakovo with another town. The US Commission report and JewishGen say the building was sold in 1948, which probably refers to the plot rather than a standing building. The Jewish cemetery with its ceremonial hall survives, and a memorial there commemorates the camp victims.

שמות בולטים