Hlučín Synagogue

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Die Geschichte von Hlučín Synagogue

Hlučín, known in German as Hultschin, is a small town about ten kilometres north-west of Ostrava, the centre of the Hlučín region (Hlučínsko) in present-day Czech Silesia. Jews lived there in the eighteenth century, and an organised community formed in the 1790s; JewishGen dates the earliest known community to 1792. The congregation consecrated its synagogue in 1842/43, at a time when the town was a busy trading place: in 1841 it counted 244 Jews, close to a tenth of the population. Its cemetery had been laid out in 1814, and a ceremonial hall was added there around 1860.

The community shrank sharply after the First World War, when Hlučín lost its importance as a trading centre, and by 1930 only 21 Jews lived in the town. According to the Czech historian Mečislav Borák, citing Jiří Fiedler's inventory of Jewish monuments, the synagogue had been devastated in 1931; JewishGen's cemetery survey reports a Czech source saying it was demolished that year. It was therefore gone before the Nazi annexation of 1938, and Borák notes that the local Nazis instead vented their hostility on the Jewish cemetery. Some later accounts, including the German Wikipedia article, assume the building was pulled down after 1945, but they give no evidence.

STANDORT

Where it stood for 89 years

Historic: Hultschin/Hlučín, street and house number unknown. Today: coordinates from the German Wikipedia article fall at Úzká 717/3, Hlučín, okres Opava (approximate; basis of the coordinates not stated).

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Die jüdische Gemeinde

Jewish settlement in Hlučín reaches back to the eighteenth century. The site Jüdische Gemeinden, successor to Joachim Hahn's survey, says that Jews probably lived in the town during the 1700s and that a community was formed in the 1790s; JewishGen's Cemetery Discovery Project gives 1792 as the earliest known date and describes the earlier settlement as scattered. The community grew in the first half of the nineteenth century. It laid out its cemetery in 1814, and by 1841 Hlučín had 244 Jewish inhabitants, close to a tenth of the town. Borák writes that Hlučín was then a significant destination for Jewish settlers because of its trade. The community also served Jews from surrounding villages, who were buried in its cemetery. After the First World War the town lost much of its role as a commercial centre and the Jewish population fell steeply. The 1930 census counted 21 Jews in Hlučín; Borák gives 41 for the whole Hlučín region, most of them in the town and some in Šilheřovice and Oldřišov. No names of rabbis, cantors, teachers or community officers were found in the sources consulted.

Architektur und Gestaltung

Very little is known about the building. It was consecrated in 1842/43, and no source consulted names its architect or builder, describes its plan, gives its seating capacity or records its exact address. One photograph of the synagogue is known: a view taken around 1920, attributed to P. Stradal, published on Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence and reproduced on the Jüdische Gemeinden page for the Troppau district. It could not be downloaded or examined in this research, so its appearance is not described here. The German Wikipedia article on the synagogue gives coordinates in the eastern part of the old town, near present-day Úzká street, but it does not say how the position was established. The cemetery's ceremonial hall of about 1860 was a separate building and stood on the cemetery site, not beside the synagogue. The style of the synagogue is unknown.

Leben in der Synagoge

No direct account of worship in the Hlučín synagogue was found. The sources consulted name no rabbi, cantor, teacher or community president who served it, and nothing is recorded about its rite, its furnishings or the festivals held there. What can be said is indirect. The congregation was large enough in the 1840s, with more than two hundred members, to build its own synagogue, and it maintained a cemetery from 1814 and a ceremonial hall there from about 1860, in which funerals for Jews from Hlučín and the surrounding villages were conducted. The gravestones recovered in 2007 date from 1814 to the second half of the nineteenth century, which reflects the period when the congregation was at its strongest. By the early 1930s about twenty Jews remained in the town, too few to sustain regular services, and the synagogue ceased to function as a house of worship around that time. Whether the last members joined another congregation, such as that of Opava (Troppau) or Ostrava, is not recorded in the sources found.

Zerstörung

The synagogue was destroyed in 1931, seven years before the Nazi annexation. Mečislav Borák, in his study of the Jews of Czech Silesia under occupation, states that the synagogue could not be burned in 1938 because it had already been devastated in 1931; he cites Jiří Fiedler's Jewish Sights of Bohemia and Moravia (Prague 1992, p. 118). JewishGen's Cemetery Discovery Project likewise reports a Czech source saying the 1842/43 synagogue was demolished in 1931. Neither source explains whether the community sold the building, whether it was pulled down by the town or by a private owner, or what devastation in 1931 involved; who demolished it is not recorded. The German-language sources (Jüdische Gemeinden and the German Wikipedia article based on it) say only that the synagogue no longer exists and was presumably demolished after 1945, a hedged statement that the Czech sources contradict. No source found records any damage to a synagogue building in Hlučín during the November 1938 pogrom. The violence of the Nazi period was instead directed at the Jewish cemetery, whose gravestones were removed and buried.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

By the time Hlučín was annexed to the German Reich after the Munich Agreement of 1938, very few Jews remained. Borák writes that the Nuremberg Laws applied in the Hlučín region immediately after annexation, but that the great majority of local Jews had left before the war, so that there was practically no Jewish population left to persecute. He records a local witness, L. Martiník, who remembered transports of Jews passing through the Hlučín region in open railway wagons and people being forbidden to give the deportees tea. The fate of the individual Jews who had lived in Hlučín in the 1930s, and how many of them were murdered in the Holocaust, is unknown from the sources consulted. The Nazis destroyed the Jewish cemetery: the memorial inscription there says it was destroyed in 1943, while other accounts place the clearance soon after 1938 or in 1942-43. The gravestones were removed and buried, some reused as paving in a ditch behind the waterworks. No Jewish community was re-established in the town after the war; JewishGen reports fewer than ten Jews living there today.

Der Ort heute

The exact plot of the synagogue has not been confirmed by any source consulted, so it is not possible to say with certainty what occupies it today. The pin for this entry uses the coordinates given in the German Wikipedia article, which fall at house 717/3 on Úzká street in the eastern part of the old town, but that article does not explain how they were derived. Nothing of the synagogue is known to survive. The Jewish cemetery fared differently: in 1946 its ceremonial hall was demolished and most of the ground became a burial place for about 3,500 Soviet soldiers, the rest a park. In 2007 Mojmír Sonnek located the buried gravestones, and in 2008-09 about 40 complete stones and some 200 fragments were set up in rows beside the Red Army cemetery, where a memorial stone records the site's history.

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