Erdőbénye Synagogue

The Jewish community

Jews came to Erdőbénye as leaseholders in the early eighteenth century, and their numbers grew after Galicia came under Habsburg rule in 1772 and after Joseph II's regulation on the Jews of 1783. Only six Jewish heads of family were recorded in 1840, but by 1880 the Orthodox community had 332 members, 16 percent of the village. It then shrank: Gazda's gazetteer gives 267 Jews in 1910, the heritage website 214 in 1920 (9 percent), JewishGen 153 in 1930, and the 1941 census counted 131 (4.2 percent), eight of whom gave Yiddish as their mother tongue. The community was closely tied to the Hasidic court of nearby Olaszliszka and for a time formed part of its congregation. Members included the quarry owner Sámuel Beck, who paid for the village's Kossuth statue, his son-in-law and successor Jónás Spitzer, the stonemason Márkusz Ábrahám Kőgel, who carved most of the stones in the Jewish cemetery, and Dávid Jichák Teitelbaum, a wine merchant from the Teitelbaum rabbinical family. When a spa opened at the village's mineral springs in the late nineteenth century, the community ran a kosher kitchen for its Jewish visitors.

Architecture and design

The Zemplén heritage website describes the synagogue as Neoclassical, built around 1840 and rebuilt after the fire of 1903; how much of the first building survived the fire is unknown. A photograph given to the Hungarian Jewish Museum in 1960 shows the entrance front: a rendered hall under a pitched roof, its gable treated as a triangular pediment above a moulded cornice. A round medallion sits at the centre of the pediment, with a small rectangular opening to one side. The corners of the front end in short piers carrying ball finials on pedestals, and the remains of another ornament stand at the apex. Below, a panelled double door reached by steps is flanked by two round-arched windows, and more round-arched windows run along the side wall. Two interior photographs show a rectangular hall with a flat ceiling painted with roundels and scalloped bands above a decorated cornice, and an end wall with a dark central feature between two arched windows and a round window above it. The architect, the builder, the seating capacity and the arrangement of the women's section are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

The congregation was Orthodox and stood in the orbit of Liska (Olaszliszka) Hasidism. Its best-known rabbi, Chaim (Hájim) Friedlander, was the son-in-law of Tzvi Hirsh Friedmann, the 'wonder rabbi' of Olaszliszka; he was rabbi of Erdőbénye before he succeeded his father-in-law at Liska in 1874, and was remembered as a scholar and a preacher with a fine voice. On the same street as the synagogue the community kept a school and house of study. The Hungarian Jewish Museum records that this building, though older, was dedicated as a Jewish school in 1884 according to the Hebrew inscription 'Beit Midrash' on its surviving front; in 2025 its owner gave the museum a metal wall candle-holder marked with a six-pointed star, found when the building was turned into a flat, together with three prayer books. A ritual bath on Serház Street was fed by spring water, as religious law requires, and is still known locally as the Fuchs house after its former attendant. The community buried its dead in its own cemetery on what is now Petőfi Street. The names of the congregation's later rabbis, cantors, teachers and presidents were not found.

Destruction

No source found records damage to the synagogue in 1944 or during the fighting that followed. After the deportations it was left without a congregation; the Jewish Photo Archive notes that it was abandoned after the Second World War because so few members survived. Photographs that the Erdőbénye community gave to the Hungarian Jewish Museum in 1960 show it derelict, with plaster fallen from the façade and large patches of the painted ceiling gone. Anikó Gazda, who inspected synagogue sites across Hungary between 1980 and 1987, marked the Hunyadi Street synagogue as demolished, while the Zemplén Jewish heritage website says it was taken down in the second half of the 1980s. Read together, the two statements point to a demolition in the mid-1980s, in the last years of Communist rule, but that is an inference and no document of the demolition was found. None of the sources says who ordered or carried out the work, whether the building had been sold beforehand, or what became of its fittings.

The community’s fate

In the spring of 1944, during the Nazi German occupation of Hungary, 120 Jews were living in Erdőbénye. They were taken first to the ghetto at Tokaj and then to the ghetto and collection camp at Sátoraljaújhely, the county seat. Randolph Braham lists Erdőbénye among the Zemplén communities concentrated there, about 15,000 people in all, in an operation directed by the deputy county prefect, Miklós Bornemisza. He records four transports from Sátoraljaújhely: 3,500 people on 16 May, 3,500 on 22 May, 4,000 on 25 May and the remainder on 3 June 1944. The Erdőbénye Jews were deported to Auschwitz. The names of 108 of them are on the martyrs' memorial in the Jewish cemetery of Miskolc, and according to the Zemplén heritage website barely a dozen of the deportees survived the war. A few returned to the village: the last Orthodox burial in the Jewish cemetery took place in 1950, and a community body still existed in 1960, when it gave photographs of the synagogue to the Jewish Museum in Budapest. No Jews live in Erdőbénye today.

The site today

The synagogue no longer stands. Its plot was on Hunyadi János Street, formerly Iskola Street; no source consulted gives its house number or says what occupies the plot today, and no marker on the site is recorded. The nearest surviving trace is the former Jewish school and house of study at Hunyadi Street 32, now a private dwelling, and the map pin is placed there. Elsewhere in the village the former ritual bath on Serház Street survives as a private house, its pool filled in after the Second World War, and the Jewish cemetery, an enclosed section of the municipal cemetery at Petőfi Street 13, is kept in good order. Three Jewish residents are named in the village's memorial park of notable inhabitants, created in 2008.

Notable names