Die Geschichte von Edelény Synagogue
Edelény lies in the valley of the Bódva river north of Miskolc, in present-day Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county, and is best known for its eighteenth-century L'Huillier-Coburg mansion. Before the Second World War it had a sizeable Jewish population. Gazda's survey of 1980-87 records 60 Jews in Edelény in 1828, 186 in 1910 and 87 in 1941; according to the English Wikipedia article on the town, Jews made up 8.3 per cent of the inhabitants in 1910.
The community's synagogue is known at present almost only from the gazetteer of Hungarian synagogues compiled by Anikó Gazda and published in 1991. Gazda dates the building to about 1900, classes it as a synagogue rather than a prayer house, and records that by the time of her field survey of 1980-87 it had been demolished. She gives no demolition date and no description, and she rated her own data as about 80 to 90 per cent reliable. No photograph, plan or description of the building was found, and the town's own website, which describes the Roman Catholic, Reformed and Greek Catholic churches of Edelény, does not mention it. Its appearance, size, architect and exact site therefore remain unknown, and this entry should be read as a record of a lost building whose history still has to be recovered.
Where it stood for nearly 90 years
Historic: Edelény, Borsod county; street and house number unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of 3780 Edelény, Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county (approximate).
Größere Karte öffnen →Die jüdische Gemeinde
Gazda's survey of 1980-87 records 60 Jews in Edelény in 1828, 186 in 1910 and 87 in 1941, and gives no figure for 1851. The English Wikipedia article on the town puts the Jewish share of the population at 8.3 per cent in 1910, which agrees with Gazda's figure for that year. The community therefore grew strongly during the nineteenth century and was at its largest in the early twentieth. A synagogue built around 1900, as Gazda dates it, suggests that the congregation was large and prosperous enough at the turn of the century to put up a building of its own. The date the community was founded, its religious affiliation (Orthodox, Neolog or Status Quo), its rabbis and its lay leaders are all unknown from the sources consulted. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 has no entry for Edelény, and the Pinkas Hakehillot volume for Hungary, the most likely source for these details, was not read.
Architektur und Gestaltung
No photograph, drawing, plan or written description of the Edelény synagogue was found, so its architecture is unknown. The only architectural facts available come from Anikó Gazda's 1991 gazetteer, which dates the building to about 1900 and classes it as a synagogue, the term she uses for a purpose-built house of worship as opposed to a prayer room in a dwelling. Nothing is known of its style, plan or decoration. The architect, the builder, the seating capacity, the arrangement of the women's gallery and the furnishings of the interior are all unknown. The hall's footprint might be recoverable from cadastral maps of Edelény held in Hungarian archives, and photographs might survive in the collections of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives or in private postcard collections.
Leben in der Synagoge
No record of religious life inside the Edelény synagogue was found in the sources that could be read for this entry. It is not known whether the congregation followed the Orthodox, Neolog or Status Quo rite, who its rabbis and cantors were, whether it kept a Talmud Torah or a Jewish elementary school beside the synagogue, or what societies, such as a Chevra Kadisha burial society, were attached to it. The building is dated to about 1900, so it served the community for a little over four decades before the deportations of 1944. Its interior arrangement, the position of the ark and bimah, and any inscriptions or memorial tablets are unknown. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 has no entry for the town; the Pinkas Hakehillot volume for Hungary and the archives of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives in Budapest may hold this information.
Zerstörung
No account of the destruction of the Edelény synagogue was found. Nothing read records damage to it during the Second World War, and no source says whether it was looted or wrecked after the community was taken away in 1944. Anikó Gazda's survey, carried out between 1980 and 1987, records the synagogue as demolished, which is the only firm evidence of its loss. No source consulted shows the building standing after 1945, so it cannot be said whether it was pulled down during the war, in the immediate postwar years, or under Communist rule. Who demolished the building is not recorded, and no record of a sale has been found. A town history, the county archives in Miskolc or local memory may hold the answer.
Das Schicksal der Gemeinde
According to the English Wikipedia article on Edelény, the town's Jewish population, which Gazda's survey puts at 87 in 1941, was deported and murdered in early June 1944. Edelény lay in the part of north-eastern Hungary from which the Hungarian authorities, after the Nazi German occupation of the country in March 1944, concentrated the Jews in ghettos and handed them over for deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May and June of that year. The ghetto or entrainment centre through which the Jews of Edelény passed, the number of people deported and the number who survived could not be established; Randolph Braham's study of the Holocaust in Hungary, which normally gives these details district by district, was not consulted. No organised Jewish community is recorded in Edelény after the war, and none exists there today.
Der Ort heute
The site of the Edelény synagogue has not been identified in any source consulted, so what stands on its plot today is unknown. No surviving fragment and no marker on the site is recorded in the sources read. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Edelény and must not be read as the synagogue's location. The street and plot may be recoverable from old cadastral maps, from the town's local-history collections, or from the records of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, and the Jewish cemetery of Edelény, if it survives, may be documented separately.
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Fotos, Dokumente, Familiengeschichten oder Erinnerungen an diese Synagoge und ihre Gemeinde halten ihre Geschichte lebendig.
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