Old Synagogue of Doboj

La comunidad judía

Sephardic Jews settled in Doboj by the early nineteenth century at the latest, and the town's Jewish Community was formally founded in 1871. Numbers remained modest: a count of 1879 found 13 Jews, rising to 101 in 1910, 108 in 1931 and about 60 on the eve of the Second World War. Later families traced their roots to Sarajevo and to nearby Gračanica and Klokotnica. Between the wars the community was led in turn by Dr Rihard Skotecki, Isak Albahari, Josef L. Pesah and Isak Levi, and Josef D. Pesah headed the burial society. Jews played an outsized part in the town's life: the first doctor, Simon Levi, the first lawyer, Emil Rubinstein, the first bank and printing press, the Pesah brothers' department store and the first hotel were all Jewish, and Dr Skotecki founded Doboj's first choral society in 1927.

Arquitectura y diseño

Almost nothing is known about the appearance of the old synagogue. The sources describe it as a Jewish communal house with a synagogue, built in 1874, which suggests a modest building combining a prayer room with rooms for the community rather than a large free-standing temple. No photograph, drawing, plan or measurement has been located, and no architect or builder is named. The only surviving fabric is its entrance: a pair of double-leaf metal doors with a rounded, arched top. Each leaf carries a Star of David, and the date 1874 is split across the two leaves, one pair of digits on each. In recent photographs the doors are painted dark grey, with horizontal metal bands and copper-coloured stars and numerals, and hang in an arched metal frame against a stone wall. Whether they formed the street entrance of the communal house or the door of the prayer hall itself is not recorded.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

The synagogue served a small Sephardic congregation; inscriptions in the town's Jewish cemetery on the Bare hillside, founded between 1876 and 1888, are in Hebrew, Ladino, Serbo-Croatian and German, reflecting the languages of its members. The community kept a Talmud Torah school for religious instruction of its children. With no rabbi of its own recorded, services were led by cantors, among them Samuel Kabiljo and Avraham Romano. A burial society, the Hevra Kadisha, led by Josef D. Pesah, cared for the dead, and a youth society called Cijon (Zion) was active between the wars. The community's presidents in those years included Dr Rihard Skotecki, Isak Albahari, Josef L. Pesah and Isak Levi.

Destrucción

After the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Doboj was placed in the Independent State of Croatia under the Ustaše regime. The Ustaše grand prefect of Doboj, Dragutin Kamber, introduced the regime's race laws, ordering Jews to wear yellow armbands. The synagogue and communal house were destroyed in 1941, while the Ustaše were rounding up the town's Jews; the inscription on the surviving doors records simply that they were torn down in 1941. The sources consulted do not say exactly who carried out the demolition or how, and some accounts place it in 1942. Doboj also had a small German garrison guarding the railway, but no source attributes the destruction to Nazi German forces. Of the building only its metal entrance doors survived, rediscovered and restored in 2003.

El destino de la comunidad

Most of Doboj's Jews were arrested by the Ustaše in 1941 and 1942. Some were sent to Ustaše camps such as Jadovno, where four Jews from the Doboj district are recorded as killed, while women, children and the elderly were deported to the camp at Đakovo. Others died in Nazi camps in Germany. Leopold Renart, a merchant, and his wife took poison when they heard the Ustaše were coming for them. In all, 89 named Jews of Doboj were murdered in 1941 and 1942, about nine in ten of the community. A few survived: Jožo Elazar escaped from prison in Doboj; Miko Atijas was saved at the railway station by Rajko Zakonović and hidden for two years by the Smailbegović family; the Kovačević family saved the Pesah brothers. The community was revived after the war, numbering 27 in 1960.

El lugar hoy

The location of the old synagogue is not documented in the sources consulted. Its surviving doors now stand in the courtyard behind the Bet Shalom Jewish Cultural Centre and synagogue at Kralja Aleksandra 33, a 1922 family house of Aleksandar Vrhovski and Oto Kalmar, rebuilt with funds from Mira and Slobodan Pavlović of Chicago and opened in November 2003. A marble tablet below the doors records their history, and a memorial plaque with the names of 89 murdered Jews was unveiled on the centre in April 2022. The Jewish Community of Doboj, with about 45 members, still meets there.

Nombres destacados