Old Synagogue of Hranice

Die jüdische Gemeinde

Tradition places the first Jewish settlers in Hranice in the late fifteenth or sixteenth century; they are said to have come from the older community at nearby Lipník nad Bečvou, and the first documentary mention dates from 1644. In 1637 Prince Maximilian of Dietrichstein, lord of the estate, confirmed the newly constituted community together with its communal house, a cemetery outside the town and a ritual bath, but he also forbade Jews to buy, rent or live in further Christian houses. Housing need grew sharply in the late seventeenth century, when exiles from Austria, above all from Vienna, arrived, and again in the early eighteenth century with newcomers from Poland. Under the Familiants Law of 1726-1727 the community was limited to 120 families; 115 lived there in 1753. In 1803 and 1836 the Dietrichsteins sold the community two properties in the suburbs, which raised the number of Jewish houses to 34. The population was about 660 in 1830 and reached its peak of 802, about 13 percent of the town, in 1857, a few years before the old synagogue was demolished.

Architektur und Gestaltung

No picture, plan or description of the old synagogue's appearance has been found. What is known comes from Jeništová's study of the estate and community records. The synagogue stood in the courtyard of the Jewish town hall, house number I in the Judengasse, rather than on the street front, and it was largely built of wood. It was repaired only provisionally after the Thirty Years' War. When the community asked in 1720 to rebuild or enlarge it, the strict rules of the time allowed, at most, a masonry building of the same height on the existing ground plan; whether that was carried out is not stated. In 1836 the estate builder Wenzel Knor (given as Kurr in some literature) surveyed the synagogue and drew a plan for a new building meant to hold all 717 members of the community, but the Olomouc consistory rejected the request. The architect, date of construction, dimensions and seating capacity of the old building are unknown.

Leben in der Synagoge

Little is recorded about worship in the old building. The community kept its own statutes: an eighteenth-century book of takkanot survives among its records, which run from 1675 and are now in the Jewish Museum in Prague, together with registers of synagogue seats. A Jewish-German elementary school was founded in 1770 and was housed with the town hall in the front building whose courtyard held the synagogue. Because the prayer house could not hold everyone, the district office allowed the community in the 1830s to set up an auxiliary synagogue for the major annual festivals in the former manorial Světlík farm in the suburb, which Jewish families had bought, and to carry a Torah scroll there; the permission had to be renewed again and again. In the 1850s the community tried to buy the former manorial granary in Zámecká street for a new synagogue, but the owner refused to sell. Hranice also produced scholars; Baruch Jakob Placzek, born in the town in 1834, became rabbi in Brno in 1861.

Zerstörung

The old synagogue was not destroyed by violence. Its own congregation pulled it down. Unable to obtain a new building plot after the refusal over the granary, the Jewish community decided to demolish the old synagogue and put a larger one on the same site, adjoining the community house now numbered 728. According to Jeništová the project succeeded above all through the efforts of Sigmund Wolf, owner of a prosperous liqueur distillery and the first mayor of the self-governing Jewish community. She dates the demolition to 1863 and says construction of the new building began immediately; other summaries say only that the old synagogue was pulled down in the early 1860s. No record names the contractor who carried out the demolition, and nothing is known of what happened to its fittings. The new synagogue by Franz Macher was consecrated in 1864.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

After the peak of 1857 the community shrank as Jews moved to larger cities: it numbered 582 in 1869, 462 in 1900 and 192, about 2 percent of the town, in 1930. Nazi German forces occupied Hranice on 15 March 1939. In December 1939 the Judengasse was renamed Janáčkova, and services in the synagogue that had replaced the old one were banned in the autumn of 1940. From 1942 the Jews of Hranice were deported by the Nazis, mostly through Olomouc or Theresienstadt, to ghettos and extermination camps. Jeništová gives 216 people from Hranice murdered in the Holocaust, 197 of them registered as Jewish by religion; nine survived the camps and seventeen, mostly partners in mixed marriages, were spared deportation. The Nazi government commissioner Karl Kettner then took over the community buildings. After the war a small congregation was revived, belonging first to the Olomouc and from 1961 to the Ostrava community, and used a prayer room until 1969.

Der Ort heute

The site of the old synagogue is occupied by its successor, the synagogue of 1863-1864, which stands on Janáčkova ulice against the town wall, next to the former Jewish town hall. The building was turned into the town museum in 1943 and now houses the Hranice municipal gallery (Galerie Synagoga) and museum spaces; it has been a protected monument since 1988. Nothing of the older timber synagogue is known to survive above ground. The street keeps its line of former Jewish houses, and the Jewish Stairs, cut through the town wall near the synagogue in 1817, still lead down towards the castle. A memorial to the Holocaust victims of Hranice stands beside the synagogue.

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