Hroznětín Synagogue

Die jüdische Gemeinde

Jews are documented in Hroznětín from 1503, and the English Wikipedia article on the town dates the Jewish ghetto to 1499. Settlement was encouraged by Karlsbad's exclusion of Jews: the Lichtenstadt Jews traded in the spa town, and some lived there illegally. JewishGen's cemetery survey counts 16 Jewish families in 1570, a figure of 298 in 1708 and 47 families in 1724. The community reached its largest size in the mid-eighteenth century with about 450 members, around 30 per cent of the population, and in 1857 still numbered 457 people, 29 per cent. Its most famous member was Abraham Aaron, later called Lichten or Lichtenstadt, an agent at the Saxon court who headed the Jewish organisation of Bohemia as primator from 1672 to 1693. Hroznětín was also the seat of regional rabbis for the Žatec and Loket counties. After 1850 most families left for Karlsbad and other towns; there were 77 Jews in 1869, 44 in 1921 and 7 in 1932. From the 1880s a prayer association in Nejdek belonged to the Hroznětín community.

Architektur und Gestaltung

Almost nothing is known about the building. The Jüdische Gemeinden survey states only that a Jewish prayer house is first mentioned in 1507 and that its successor, the synagogue, dates from the eighteenth century. Whether the new synagogue stood on the site of the old prayer house is not stated, and neither the year of construction nor the builder or architect is recorded in the sources read. Hugo Gold's 1934 volume on the Jews of Bohemia has a two-and-a-half-page article on Lichtenstadt with three illustrations of people; it was not available in translation and could not be read in this run. Harold Hammer-Schenk's Synagogen in Deutschland (1981) lists Lichtenstadt and has an illustration (figure 235) which may show the building, but it was not seen. No historical photograph, postcard, plan or interior description of the synagogue was found, so its size, style, materials and seating capacity are unknown. Given the town's history of fires, including the great fire of 1873, it is possible the building was repaired or altered in the nineteenth century, but no source says so.

Leben in der Synagoge

The sources read give very little about worship in the synagogue. JewishGen's cemetery survey describes the community as conservative in character and says Hroznětín was the seat of regional rabbis whose districts covered the counties of Žatec (Saaz) and Loket (Elbogen). A genealogical compilation on jewgenpedia.com names Salomon Ponti, who settled in Lichtenstadt in 1701, as a rabbi there. The rabbi Mordechai ben Abraham Benet (Marcus Benedikt, 1753-1829) is listed among those buried in the town's Jewish cemetery, although his remains were exhumed in 1830. In the seventeenth century the presence of the primator Abraham Aaron made the small town a centre of Bohemian Jewish administration. By the 1880s the congregation had become the parent body of a prayer association in Nejdek, whose cash book survives; the Hroznětín community archive in the Jewish Museum in Prague covers only 1921 to 1938. Names of cantors, teachers or later officers were not found.

Zerstörung

The Jüdische Gemeinden survey states that the eighteenth-century synagogue was partly destroyed in 1938. That was the year the Sudeten German districts, Hroznětín among them, were annexed to Nazi Germany; JewishGen's cemetery survey says an independent congregation existed until the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. None of the sources read says exactly when in 1938 the building was damaged, how, or by whom, so attribution to the Nazis rests on the timing rather than on a named source. The community was disbanded under the Nazi occupation and its last records went to the Jewish authorities in Prague in October 1938, so the building had no congregation from then on. The same survey says the synagogue was demolished in the 1950s, which falls in the period of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Who ordered or carried out the demolition, whether the ruin was first sold, and the exact year are not recorded in any source found.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

By the 1930s the Jewish community of Hroznětín was very small: 9 people in 1930 and 7 in 1932, according to JewishGen's cemetery survey. The Jüdische Gemeinden survey says the remaining community dissolved in the 1930s. The archive of the Jewish Museum in Prague holds the community's surviving records, which run from 1921 to the end of 1938; a receipt dated 31 October 1938 from the Supreme Council of the Associations of Jewish Religious Communities in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia records that the cash book of the Nejdek prayer association, account records and a savings book were handed over to it, weeks after the region was annexed by Nazi Germany. According to the EHRI archival description, the community was disbanded during the Nazi occupation and was not re-established after the Second World War, and its papers reached the Jewish Museum during the wartime collection of documents from liquidated communities. What became of the last Jewish residents of Hroznětín, and how many were murdered in the Holocaust, is unknown from the sources read.

Der Ort heute

The site of the synagogue has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what stands on the plot today. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Hroznětín and should not be read as the synagogue's location. The town's main surviving Jewish monument is its cemetery, about 800 metres north-west of the square on a wooded hillside, one of the oldest in Bohemia, probably founded in the late fifteenth century. Of its roughly 300 gravestones some date from the late seventeenth century. It was heavily damaged in the Nazi era, has been partly restored by private initiatives, and has suffered desecration in recent years.

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