Hajdúdorog Synagogue

La comunità ebraica

According to the survey of the Hajdúdorog Jewish cemetery by the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, Jews first settled in the town at the beginning of the nineteenth century and their numbers then grew. Anikó Gazda's gazetteer gives 28 Jews in 1828, no figure for 1851, 447 in 1910 and 321 in 1941, so the community was at its largest around the turn of the twentieth century and had lost more than a quarter of its members by the eve of the Second World War. The cemetery survey credits the Harstein family with founding the organised community between 1848 and 1850, and the oldest gravestone found in the cemetery dates from 1849. The synagogue was built before 1859. Randolph Braham places it at the north-eastern end of the main square, and English Wikipedia, without citing a source, says most Jews lived in three streets near the edge of town. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 has no entry for Hajdúdorog, so the community's rite, its rabbis and its officers between the wars could not be established from the sources read.

Architettura e design

The only view found is an undated photograph mounted on an album page with the handwritten caption 'Hajdu Dorog'. It shows a free-standing rectangular hall with plastered walls and a pitched tiled roof, seen from a street corner. The short gable wall is divided by a flat central pilaster strip; on either side is a large round-arched window with a moulded surround at upper level and a dark rectangular opening near the ground. A moulded band crosses the wall at eaves height, and the gable above it has a round window at its centre and a small block at its peak. Each corner pier ends in a capped pedestal carrying a metal Star of David. The long side wall has a moulded eaves cornice and, nearest the gable, two bays of small round-arched windows in two tiers, followed by three tall round-arched windows. The two tiers probably mark a women's gallery at that end, but this is an inference from the photograph. A fence of timber palings on a solid base encloses the plot. The architect, the builder, the seating capacity and the interior are unknown, and no plan or interior view was found.

La vita nella sinagoga

Very little about the life of the congregation could be documented. No source read in this research names a rabbi, cantor or teacher of Hajdúdorog, and the 1929 Magyar Zsidó Lexikon, which describes the neighbouring communities of Hajdúhadház and Hajdúszoboszló, has no entry for the town. What is recorded is the frame of communal life: an organised community founded by the Harstein family between 1848 and 1850, a cemetery in use from 1849 until 1950, and a synagogue standing before 1859 that served a community of 447 people in 1910 and 321 in 1941. The photograph shows a substantial hall, with what looks like a two-storey section at one end for the women's gallery. The last recorded use of the building by the town's Jews was involuntary. In 1944 the synagogue and its surroundings became the ghetto, and about 350 people were crowded into and around it. The cemetery survey records that the community's Torah scrolls were cut into pieces to make insoles for shoes, and that the pieces were later buried in the cemetery.

Distruzione

The synagogue was not destroyed during the war. After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 the Hungarian authorities turned the synagogue and the buildings around it into the town's ghetto, and on 17 June 1944 its inmates were taken away. The Torah scrolls were cut up for shoe insoles; the source does not say by whom. The one photograph found shows the building intact, with Stars of David still on its corner piers; it is undated, but the car parked beside it suggests the years after the war. According to the cemetery survey of the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, the survivor Samuel Reichmann sold the synagogue in 1957 on behalf of the former Jewish community. The buyer is not named. Anikó Gazda, who surveyed Hungarian synagogue sites between 1980 and 1987, recorded the Hajdúdorog synagogue as demolished. The building was therefore pulled down under Communist rule, at some point between the sale of 1957 and the 1980s. No source found gives the year, and none says whether a private buyer, a cooperative or a council body demolished it.

Il destino della comunità

Gazda's gazetteer counts 321 Jews in Hajdúdorog in 1941. Nazi Germany occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944, and in the following weeks the Hungarian authorities confined the Jews of the Hajdú towns to ghettos. Randolph Braham writes that the Hajdúdorog ghetto lay at the north-eastern end of the main square, off Jackovits Mihály Street, in and around the synagogue. It held about 350 Jews, roughly 300 of them from the town itself. The Jewish Council was headed for a time by Dr László Hercz. On 17 June 1944 the inmates were moved to Debrecen on the same train that carried the Jews of Hajdúböszörmény and Hajdúnánás. From 21 June the Jews gathered in Debrecen were held at the Serly brickyard, 13,084 people in all according to Braham. Two of the transports from Debrecen, carrying 6,841 people, left on 26 and 27 June and ended up in Austria; the others went to Auschwitz. Which train carried the Jews of Hajdúdorog is not stated. The cemetery survey says that few of them survived and that only a few of the survivors returned. The last gravestone in the cemetery was set up in 1950.

Il luogo oggi

The exact plot has not been identified, so what stands on it today is unknown. Braham's description places the synagogue at the north-eastern end of the main square, off Jackovits Mihály Street; a street called Jaczkovics utca runs north of Petőfi tér in today's town, and the map pin is set on it as an approximation. No remains of the building are recorded. English Wikipedia mentions a memorial to the Jewish community near the centre of the town. The Jewish cemetery survives at Iskolakert utca 7, on the western side of Hajdúdorog. It is said to have been bought by the local council in 1963; it is fenced and is maintained by the Heritage Foundation for Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries.

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