Horažďovice Synagogue

הקהילה היהודית

The Jewish Museum in Prague's register of communities records ten Jewish families in Horažďovice in 1618 and notes that settlement may be older, since earlier records were lost in fires. In 1702 there were 45 Jews, about 5.5 per cent of the town; in 1724 thirteen families of about 64 people; in 1783 nineteen families; and in 1849 twenty-seven families with 130 people. Jüdische Gemeinden says the Jews lived by trading in local produce and that the community grew after the town was connected to the railway at the end of the nineteenth century, taking in Jews from nearby villages such as Rabí. The census figures peaked at 300 Jews, 9 per cent of the population, in 1890, then fell to 237 in 1900, 192 in 1910, 154 in 1921 and 106 in 1930. A Jewish schoolmaster is mentioned in 1757. Around the 1890s the community head Eduard Münz proposed that communal business and services be conducted in Czech. The community kept a cemetery on the northern edge of town, laid out in the first half of the nineteenth century, with older stones brought from an earlier burial ground.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

No photograph, plan or description of the building's exterior was found in this research, so its appearance, style and size are unknown. The Jewish Museum in Prague's register gives its position: house number 75 in Prácheňská street, formerly Židovská, on building plot 37 with an area of 223 square metres, on the east side of the street towards the town walls, where the older synagogue had stood. It was rebuilt after the 1868 fire. According to the same register its interior fittings came from a closed synagogue of Polish Jews in Vienna, bought by the merchant Jakub Kohn; English Wikipedia dates that purchase to 1901. In 1901 the women's section was enlarged and rebuilt with tiered seating, electric lighting was installed, and a glass panel of the Ten Commandments designed by Rabbi Friedmann was made by František Křižík's Prague firm. A stone from the older building, recording its enlargement in about 1815-1821, was later moved to the cemetery. Jüdische Gemeinden describes the last building as dilapidated by its final years.

החיים בבית הכנסת

Horažďovice had its own rabbis through most of the nineteenth century, though the Jewish Museum's register notes a vacancy from 1840 to 1853. Among those it names are Abraham Winternitz (1839-1840), Zacharias Spitz (1853-1857), Bernard Altar (1861-1862), Moses Rosenstrauch (1862-1865), Daniel Kohn (1866-1871), Leopold Müller (1871-1875) and Moses Stark (1875-1883). The longest-serving and last was Martin Friedmann, rabbi from 1887 to 1931, who designed the illuminated glass Ten Commandments installed in 1901. In the same year the merchant Jakub Kohn furnished the synagogue with fittings from Vienna. During the First World War part of the interior, including metal fittings such as a large chandelier, was requisitioned. The register records the last weddings in the synagogue in 1926; in 1915 one wedding was held in a separate winter prayer room in house 99. After Friedmann's retirement in 1931 the congregation had no rabbi, and the lay leader Adolf Popper led it until 1941. Its ten Torah scrolls survived the war.

הרס

Jüdische Gemeinden states that the synagogue was partly destroyed during the Nazi German occupation. A bachelor's thesis on the town's Jewish heritage says most of the interior was destroyed in the Second World War and that the building served the Nazi German army as a store; it also records that synagogue furniture was sold as fuel in 1943, and that a few furnishings rescued by workmen are now in the town museum. The sources read do not name the individuals who wrecked the interior, but the building was in the hands of the Nazi German occupiers. JewishGen's Cemetery Discovery Project adds that soldiers of the United States Army held services in it after liberation. It then served as a warehouse for many years. In 1964 the Jewish community of Plzeň, to which Horažďovice then belonged, handed it over to the state for future demolition, and its ten Torah scrolls went to Westminster Synagogue in London. In 1980 the Ministry of Culture of Communist Czechoslovakia cancelled its heritage protection, and it was demolished that year together with neighbouring houses. English Wikipedia states that the Communists destroyed it; which state body carried out the demolition is not recorded in the sources read.

גורל הקהילה

After the Nazi German occupation of March 1939, Jews in Horažďovice were dismissed from their jobs, made to surrender radios and barred from restaurants; in 1940 their shops were closed, and in 1941 men up to fifty were put to forced labour, fourteen families lost their homes and the yellow star became compulsory. Six people had already been sent to Mauthausen, Auschwitz or Dachau after denunciation by members of Vlajka, the Czech fascist movement. In November 1942 the remaining Jewish families were gathered in Klatovy and deported on transport Cd of 26 November 1942 to Theresienstadt. Rabbi Martin Friedmann died there in 1943. Most of the others were sent on to Auschwitz in transports of January, September and December 1943 and murdered. The thesis counts 93 deportees from the town, 86 of whom were killed; three mixed-marriage families stayed behind. Survivors included Olga Loheit and Shlomo Fischl. No congregation re-formed: by 1964 the few Jews left belonged to the Plzeň community. Stolpersteine for Horažďovice victims were laid in 2014 and 2016.

האתר כיום

The synagogue stood at Prácheňská 75, on the east side of the former Jewish street in the eastern part of the old town. According to the Jewish Museum in Prague's register, a two-storey residential building with the house numbers 884 and 885 was put up on the plot, and on part of the old cemetery next to it, before 1984. Gravestones were recovered in 1983 when the buildings around the synagogue site were cleared. A remnant of the old Jewish street survives near Prácheňská and Ševčíkova streets. A memorial plaque on the house now standing on the site recalls the synagogue. The Jewish cemetery on the northern edge of town survives with many old gravestones.

שמות בולטים