Iregszemcse Synagogue

RESUMEN

La historia de Iregszemcse Synagogue

Iregszemcse is a village in the Tamási district of Tolna county, in Transdanubia. Its Jewish community lived in one of its two parent villages, Felsőireg, often called simply Ireg. Felsőireg and Szemcséd were united shortly before the Second World War; the village website says the joint name Iregszemcse has been in use since 21 January 1940, under an Interior Ministry order of 29 November 1939, and a postcard dated 23 August 1939 still carries the name Felsőireg.

Very little about the synagogue itself could be established. The only source found that documents it is Anikó Gazda's gazetteer of Hungarian synagogues, which lists the village with 100 Jews in 1910 and 50 in 1941, classes its building as a synagogue, gives no construction date and records it as demolished when she surveyed the sites between 1980 and 1987. Ferenc Elblinger's 2017 survey of Tolna county's lost synagogues names Iregszemcse only on Gazda's authority. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 has no entry for the village, the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives holds no photograph under any of its names, and the one Felsőireg postcard record read shows no Jewish building. The village's Jews were presumably among those of the Tamási district who were confined in the Tamási ghetto in 1944 and deported to Auschwitz in early July. No photograph, plan or description of the synagogue has been found.

UBICACIÓN

Where it stood

Historic: Felsőireg (Ireg), Tamási district, Tolna county; street and house number unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of 7095 Iregszemcse, Tolna county (approximate).

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La comunidad judía

Anikó Gazda's gazetteer is the only source found that gives figures for the Jews of this village. She has no number for 1828 or for 1851, and counts 100 Jews in 1910 and 50 in 1941, so the community halved in the three decades before the Holocaust. Whether the blank early columns mean that few Jews lived in Felsőireg in the first half of the nineteenth century, or only that the figures are missing, cannot be told from her table. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929, which describes many Hungarian congregations with their founders, rabbis and officers, has no headword for Felsőireg or Ireg, so the date the congregation was founded, its religious affiliation, its leaders and the registry district it belonged to are all unknown. The Hebrew Pinkas Hakehillot volume for Hungary does list an entry under 'Felsőireg (Iregszemcse)', which shows that an organised community is recorded there, but that entry has not been translated on JewishGen and could not be read for this account.

Arquitectura y diseño

No photograph, drawing, plan or written description of the building has been found, so its appearance cannot be described. Gazda's table classes it as a synagogue (her code 'ZS') and leaves the column for the building date empty. With about a hundred Jews in the village in 1910, it was presumably a modest village building, but that is an inference from the size of the community and not a documented fact. Searches for Iregszemcse, Felsőireg, Ireg and Szemcséd in the online collection of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives returned nothing relevant. A multi-view postcard of Felsőireg dated 23 August 1939, photographed by Gyula Tóth Szabó, shows Kossuth Lajos Square, the Roman Catholic church, the Hangya cooperative and Baron Kornfeld's country house, and other catalogued postcards are titled for the Reformed church and Szentháromság Square; none is captioned as showing the synagogue. Its architect, builder, date, style, seating capacity, materials and interior arrangement are all unknown, as is its position in the village.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

Nothing specific is recorded in the sources found about worship or communal life in this synagogue. No rabbi, cantor, teacher, ritual slaughterer or lay officer of the congregation is named in anything read for this account, and it is unknown whether the community employed its own rabbi or came under the rabbinate of a larger neighbouring congregation. Its affiliation, whether Neolog, Orthodox or Status Quo, is also unknown, and so is whether it kept a school, a burial society or a cemetery of its own. What can be said is limited to numbers: the building served about 100 people in 1910 and about 50 in 1941, so in its last decades services were held for only a handful of families. A fuller picture probably lies in the untranslated Pinkas Hakehillot entry for Felsőireg and in the data sheets that Hungarian Jewish communities filed in April 1944, neither of which could be read here.

Destrucción

How and when the synagogue was destroyed is not documented in any source read. Anikó Gazda recorded it as demolished at the time of her 1980-87 survey, giving no date and naming nobody; that is the only firm evidence, and it shows only that the building was gone by 1987. No source read proves that it was still standing after 1945, and none reports damage in 1944 or 1945. Ferenc Elblinger, writing in 2017 on Tolna county's lost synagogues, lists Iregszemcse only on Gazda's authority, but he describes what he calls the typical fate of the county's synagogues. After 1945 religious life resumed only in Bonyhád, Paks, Szekszárd and Dombóvár. Elsewhere too few worshippers were left to keep up the buildings, the national Jewish council allowed them to be sold, and the prices were so low that it was worth buying them just for the building material, after which the buyers pulled them down. It is possible that the Iregszemcse synagogue went the same way, but nothing found says so, and who demolished it is unknown.

El destino de la comunidad

Gazda counts 50 Jews in the village in 1941. After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 and the ghetto decree published on 28 April, the deputy prefect of Tolna county, Edvin Szongott, whom Randolph Braham calls an antisemite, issued decree 8100/1944 ordering eight ghetto centres at Szekszárd, Dombóvár, Paks, Dunaföldvár, Tolna, Hőgyész, Tamási and Bonyhád. The one at Tamási was for the Jews of the Tamási district, to which Iregszemcse belongs, so the village's Jews were presumably taken there, although no source read names the village. The Tamási ghetto occupied a block of houses between Kossuth Square and Eötvös Street, and Braham cites a list of 210 Jews held in it. According to Elblinger, the county's Jews were deported in the first days of July through the entrainment centre at Kaposvár; 4,790 people deported from Tolna county reached Auschwitz on 9 July, where most were killed. Tamási commemorates 4 July 1944 as the day its Jews and those of the surrounding villages were deported. How many Jews of Iregszemcse were killed or returned is unknown.

El lugar hoy

The plot on which the synagogue stood has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what occupies it today. The village website and a regional development agency's page list the sights of Iregszemcse, among them the Viczay-Kornfeld country house, the Catholic and Reformed churches and several monuments, and neither mentions a synagogue, a Jewish cemetery or any marker on a former Jewish site. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of the village and should not be read as the synagogue's location. Fixing the site will need the cadastral maps of Felsőireg, the Tolna county archives or local memory.

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