Güssing Synagogue

The Jewish community

No sources survive for the earliest Jewish settlement in Güssing; a Jewish tax was introduced by Christoph Batthyány in 1684, and a dispute of 1686 with Sopron is the first firm evidence of Jewish traders in the area. Güssing's Jews belonged at first to the community of Rechnitz and sought independence from it in 1728. In 1732 the families petitioned Count Ludwig Batthyány for protection, and in 1742 nine families with 44 people received housing and a prayer room in the Stadtmeierhof. A mikveh in its cellar was known to locals as the 'Tunkh'. In 1829 Christoph Batthyány gave 21 families a further building, the 'Judengebäude'. Numbers rose from 31 in 1735 to 275 in 1800, 526 in 1839 and 766 in 1859, then fell to 269 in 1880, 95 in 1910 and between 74 and 140 in the 1930s. Jews traded in leather and wool and ran a potash and grease factory. The community kept a school, bought in 1855, a burial society, a charity and a women's association.

Architecture and design

The architect is unknown. A topographical description of 1838 says only that the building was of solid materials with a tile roof. It was a brick hall on a rectangular plan, about 30.4 by 11.9 metres, under a hipped roof. The long street front had six tall round-arched windows, each framed by paired pilasters, and two symmetrical entrances in the second and fifth bays, each leading through a vestibule; the German Wikipedia article places the entrances on the south side. Inside was a single large hall with a tiled floor and a timber joist ceiling painted with a shofar and a Hebrew blessing. The bimah stood in the centre on a raised platform with a turned railing, with prayer desks on both sides. The Torah ark, holding five or six scrolls behind a curtain and flanked by two pairs of columns, stood in a small annex in the middle of the east wall, with a clock with Roman numerals to its right. The women's section lay behind a carved lattice screen with its own entrance; whether it was a raised gallery is unclear in the sources. The rabbi's house adjoined on the west.

Life inside the synagogue

Little is recorded about worship in the building. The thesis by Matthäus Beczak notes that each worshipper had an assigned seat, that wash basins stood by the doors, and that a temple attendant lived in the building. The community's charitable life was organised through the Chevra Kadisha burial society, a charity fund called Zedokoh and a women's association, and it maintained its own school from 1855. Adalbert Rothstein made a drawing of the painted shofar on the ceiling in 1938, and Berth Rothstein's memoir of Güssing, 'Der Béla von Güssing', reproduces a view of the east front. The last rabbi was Jakob Grünfeld, who served into the 1930s and was well respected in the town; the German Wikipedia article reports that he knew Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna. Under him the congregation was small, numbering about 75 people in 1938, a fraction of the hundreds who had filled the hall in the mid-nineteenth century.

Destruction

By the November Pogrom of 9-10 November 1938 the synagogue already stood empty. Members of the Nazi SA and the Hitler Youth broke in, carried the movable contents out onto the square in front of it and burned them: the Torah scrolls, the community's registers, the furniture, decorations and chandeliers, the seven-branched menorah and the clock with Roman numerals. Nazi SA men twice tried to set the building itself on fire, but each time the fire went out. The Nazi authorities then converted the hall into a 'Turn- und Festhalle', a gymnasium and festival hall that opened on 12 February 1939 and was used for Nazi Party events; the round-arched windows were replaced by rectangular ones and most pilasters and cornices were removed. After the war the town of Güssing bought the building. In 1953 the municipality partly demolished it to build a new town hall, keeping the foundations and about two-thirds of the outer walls; in 1957 the land register changed the plot's description from 'Tempel' to 'Haus'.

The community’s fate

After the Anschluss of March 1938, Nazi persecution in Güssing was immediate. Jews were arrested and robbed of their property; most of the roughly 75 members fled as quickly as they could, while others were loaded onto lorries, driven to the Hungarian or Yugoslav border and expelled. Some reached Vienna, and some escaped through Italy to America and overseas. The local Nazi authorities declared Güssing 'judenfrei' in 1938, and according to the ANU Museum no Jews lived there by June 1938. The Jewish cemetery was desecrated and its gravestones removed; seventeen of them were later found at the Jewish cemetery in Graz and returned. Rabbi Jakob Grünfeld died in 1947; where he spent the war is not recorded in the sources read. How many of the Güssing Jews who were expelled to Vienna or neighbouring countries were later deported and murdered is not established in the sources read. Very few returned after 1945; the Latzer family, back from England, is the only one recorded. Restitution claims dragged on into the 1950s and in some cases until 2000.

The site today

The site, on the north side of the Hauptplatz, is occupied by the Güssing town hall at Hauptplatz 7, built in 1953-58 to designs by the architect Anselm Podlipny. According to the German Wikipedia article, the town hall's former cinema, later converted into the Stadtsaal, stands on the synagogue's foundations and incorporates about two-thirds of its outer walls, though nothing of its original appearance remains visible. A memorial plaque has been placed in the town hall entrance since 1997, and Stolpersteine were laid in front of the building in 2021. The Jewish cemetery of Güssing survives.

Notable names