Die Geschichte von Hořelice Synagogue
Hořelice lies west of Prague, in today's Praha-západ district of Central Bohemia. It is an old settlement, first mentioned in 1052, when it and neighbouring Dušníky belonged to the convent of St George at Prague Castle; from the fifteenth century it passed through the hands of various lesser noble families, who held it with a Baroque manor house that still stands. In 1936 Hořelice and Dušníky were raised to market towns, and in 1951 the two were merged into a new municipality given the invented name Rudná, which became a town in 2000.
The Jewish history of the village is known only in outline. Jiří Fiedler's gazetteer of Jewish monuments in Bohemia and Moravia lists Hořelice among the Jewish religious communities and associations in the countryside around Mořina, 9 km to the south, and gives one line on its synagogue: it was built in 1842 and was demolished after 1950. The same list mentions a synagogue of 1877 at nearby Vysoký Újezd that was converted into a house, and prayer rooms at Vonoklasy and Všenory. A chapter on Horelitz appears in Hugo Gold's 1934 collective history of the Jews of Bohemia, but it was not available to read. No photograph, plan or description of the Hořelice building has been found, so this entry records the little that is documented and marks the rest as unknown.
Where it stood for 108 years
Historic: Hořelice (German Horelitz), Bohemia; street and house number unknown. Today: Hořelice, part of the town of Rudná, okres Praha-západ, Středočeský kraj; exact site unknown, pin at the village centre (approximate).
Größere Karte öffnen →Die jüdische Gemeinde
Hořelice was one of several small rural Jewish settlements in the countryside west of Prague. Fiedler groups it with the communities and prayer groups around Mořina, a village with a recognisable Jewish quarter of eight houses, a synagogue and a cemetery founded in 1735-36. Neighbouring congregations existed at Vysoký Újezd, Davle, Vonoklasy, Všenory and Zbraslav. When the Hořelice Jews first settled, how many families lived there and how the community was organised are all unknown from the sources read. That a synagogue was built in 1842 suggests a congregation large enough to support a purpose-built house of prayer at that time, but no population figure for it was found. At Mořina, Fiedler shows the Jewish population falling steadily after 1848 as families moved to towns and to Prague, and that community was attached to Beroun in 1908. Whether Hořelice followed the same pattern, and when its congregation ceased to function, is unknown. No names of rabbis, teachers or officers of the Hořelice congregation were found.
Architektur und Gestaltung
Nothing is known about the appearance of the Hořelice synagogue beyond its date. Fiedler gives the year 1842 for its construction and calls it a synagogue (synagoga), as distinct from the prayer rooms (modlitebna) he lists for Vonoklasy and Všenory, which indicates a separate building used for worship rather than a room in a private house. No architect, builder, plan, photograph, postcard or description of the exterior or interior was found in the sources consulted, and the materials, size and seating capacity are unknown. Hugo Gold's 1934 chapter on Horelitz and the nineteenth-century cadastral maps of Hořelice, which would show the building's footprint if it stood when they were drawn, are the most likely places to find more.
Leben in der Synagoge
No account of religious life in the Hořelice synagogue has been found. It is not known whether the congregation ever employed its own rabbi or teacher, or which district rabbi it came under. The location of the cemetery used by Hořelice Jews was also not established; the nearest documented Jewish burial grounds are at Mořina, 9 km to the south, and at Třebotov, which belonged to the Zbraslav community. Fiedler's text does not record when services in Hořelice stopped. Because the synagogue was still standing in 1950, it is possible that it had already ceased to be used for worship decades earlier, as Fiedler records for the Mořina synagogue, closed after 1907, but no source read confirms when the congregation stopped meeting or whether the building was sold or given another use before the Second World War.
Zerstörung
No source read records damage to the Hořelice synagogue during the Nazi German occupation of Bohemia between 1939 and 1945. The building survived the war: Fiedler's gazetteer, first published in 1991, states that the synagogue of 1842 was demolished after 1950, which places its loss in the period of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, around the time Hořelice was merged with Dušníky to form Rudná. Who owned the building at the time, what it was being used for, and who ordered or carried out its demolition are not recorded in the sources consulted, and the exact year is unknown. It may have been sold before demolition, as many disused village synagogues in Bohemia were after the war, but no evidence for that was found.
Das Schicksal der Gemeinde
What happened to the Jews of Hořelice during the Holocaust has not been established. No source read gives the number of Jews living in the village in 1930, before the Nazi German occupation of 1939, and Fiedler's text on the surrounding area shows that the rural Jewish population west of Prague had dwindled to a handful of people by then: Mořina, the nearest community he describes in detail, had only four Jewish residents in 1930. Whether any Jews still lived in Hořelice when the Nazis occupied Bohemia, and whether any were deported and murdered, is unknown: no names of individual victims from Hořelice were found in this research. Families who had left the village for Prague or other towns before the war cannot be traced from the sources read. No Jewish community was re-established in Hořelice after 1945. Searching the Terezín victims database of holocaust.cz for people born in or deported from Hořelice would be the next step.
Der Ort heute
The plot on which the Hořelice synagogue stood has not been identified in any source consulted, and no surviving fragment or marker is recorded. Hořelice today forms the western part of the town of Rudná, in the Praha-západ district; its Baroque manor house survives in private hands. The map pin for this entry marks the centre of Hořelice as given by OpenStreetMap and should not be read as the synagogue's exact location. Locating the site will require the nineteenth-century cadastral maps of Hořelice or local records such as the Rudná municipal chronicle.
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Fotos, Dokumente, Familiengeschichten oder Erinnerungen an diese Synagoge und ihre Gemeinde halten ihre Geschichte lebendig.
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