Hurbanovo Synagogue

ÜBERBLICK

Die Geschichte von Hurbanovo Synagogue

Ógyalla was a market village on the road from Komárom to Érsekújvár in Komárom county of the Kingdom of Hungary. It was renamed Stará Ďala when it passed to Czechoslovakia in 1920 and Hurbanovo in 1948. Elek Fényes's gazetteer of 1851 counts 240 Jewish residents and records that the village had a synagogue alongside its Catholic and Reformed churches. The English Wikipedia list of synagogues in Slovakia gives a Hurbanovo synagogue built in 1880 and marks it as destroyed, with the year of destruction left as a question mark and no source cited. If both statements are right, the building of 1880 may have replaced the prayer house Fényes knew, but no source read says so. No photograph, plan, address or description of the building was found. Pinkas Hakehillot Slovakia has an entry for the community on book page 380, but it is not translated online and could not be read. The Hungarian heritage register for southern Slovakia, hunektar.sk, lists more than 150 records for Ógyalla without a single Jewish site, and the Slovak municipal portal e-obce.sk is equally silent. What survives of Jewish Hurbanovo on the ground today is its cemetery. This entry records what is known so that the building is not lost from the record altogether.

STANDORT

Where it stood

Historic: Ógyalla (Stará Ďala), Komárom county; street unknown. Today: Hurbanovo, Komárno district, Nitra region; pin at the town centre (approximate).

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Die jüdische Gemeinde

Jews were living in Ógyalla by the first half of the nineteenth century. Fényes's 1851 description of the village counts 240 Jewish inhabitants against 1,150 Catholics, 220 Reformed and 3 Lutherans, so Jews made up roughly one resident in seven. He describes a village living from grain, rye and tobacco, with a small cigar workshop; the occupations of its Jewish families are not described in the sources read. By 1930 the community had shrunk in relative terms: the Czechoslovak census counted 120 people of the Jewish faith among 3,250 inhabitants, 78 of whom declared Jewish nationality. Whether the congregation followed the Orthodox or the Neolog rite after the Hungarian schism of 1868-1869, who served as its rabbi, and which larger community it belonged to are not recorded in any source read for this entry.

Architektur und Gestaltung

Nothing is known about the building's architecture. No source read gives its address, size, materials, style or architect, and no photograph or drawing of it has been found. The single list entry supplies only a construction year of 1880. A postcard link attached to the list row points to a Slovak synagogue gallery on the Czech site judaica.cz, but the gallery loads by script and no image identified as Ógyalla could be read. Whether it was built of brick or wood, whether it had a women's gallery, and how many worshippers it held are all unknown, so the entry leaves its capacity, architect and style blank as unknown. The 1880 date itself is uncertain, since Fényes already recorded a synagogue in the village three decades earlier.

Leben in der Synagoge

No account of worship or communal life inside the Ógyalla synagogue has been found. What can be said comes from the wider record of the community. The town's Jewish cemetery, on the street now called Nový diel, holds 114 gravestones; the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative (ESJF) recorded the oldest legible stone as dating from 1885 and the newest from 1919. The cemetery shows a congregation that buried its own dead in the village for at least three decades, but the names of its rabbis, cantors, teachers and officers, and any school or ritual bath, are not documented in the sources read. The untranslated Pinkas Hakehillot entry is the most likely place where such details survive.

Zerstörung

The building's existence as a synagogue of 1880 and its loss rest on a single unreferenced entry in the English Wikipedia list of synagogues in Slovakia, which describes it simply as destroyed and gives no year. No second source has been found for its demolition. Maroš Borský's survey of synagogue architecture in Slovakia, which lists many demolished buildings, does not mention Ógyalla or Hurbanovo, and neither does the synagogyslovenska.sk list of lost synagogues. It is therefore not known whether the building was damaged during the Second World War, when the town was under Hungarian rule from 1938 to 1945, or after the war, or whether it was demolished by a public body, sold and pulled down, or simply allowed to decay. Who demolished it is not recorded.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

Ógyalla was annexed to Hungary under the First Vienna Award in November 1938 and stayed under Hungarian rule until 1945, so its Jews were subject to Hungary's anti-Jewish laws and, after the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, to deportation. The sources read do not say where Ógyalla's Jews were concentrated. In the nearby county seat of Komárom, Hungarian authorities set up a ghetto in mid-May 1944 for the town and the surrounding districts; the Hungarian gendarmerie closed it on 8 June, and two trains on 13 and 16 June carried 5,463 Jews towards Auschwitz-Birkenau, the gendarmes handing them over to the Nazi SS at Kassa (Košice). Whether the Jews of Ógyalla were among them, how many were murdered and how many survived is not confirmed. No organised community re-formed: the 2001 census recorded seven people of the Jewish faith in Hurbanovo.

Der Ort heute

The site of the synagogue has not been identified, and it is not known what stands on its plot today. Hurbanovo is now a town of about 7,500 people, best known for its astronomical and meteorological observatory. The Jewish cemetery on Nový diel survives, with 114 gravestones. When ESJF surveyed it, the record described the ground as large and severely overgrown, with a pool-like formation that may be the foundations of a building; ESJF later fenced the cemetery in December 2022 and now records it as fenced and well maintained. No memorial to the synagogue is recorded.

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