La historia de Old Synagogue of Ivanovice na Hané
Ivanovice na Hané lies in the Haná plain of central Moravia, about seven kilometres north-east of Vyškov. Jews are recorded there from 1576, when a Jew named Abraham bought a plot in what is now Havlíčkova street, and gravestones in the Jewish cemetery go back to the early seventeenth century. According to Jaroslav Klenovský's encyclopedia of Jewish monuments in Moravia and Silesia, the community first prayed in what was probably a wooden prayer house. After the Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1648, it built a synagogue on the plot in the quarter later called Stará čtvrť, where the town's surviving synagogue building stands today. A synagogue in Ivanovice is documented in 1727, the time when the authorities forced the Jews into a closed quarter in the south-west of the town, with the synagogue at the centre of its smallest blocks. This older building was lost in an extensive fire in 1799. A year later the congregation put up a new synagogue in the Empire style on the same site; that successor still stands, converted in 1951 into a church of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, and is not the subject of this entry. No picture, plan or description of the older synagogue has been found.
Where it stood for 151 years
Historic: Jewish quarter (Stará čtvrť, called Židárna), Ivanovice na Hané, Moravia. Today: site of the former synagogue (Hussite church) in Stará čtvrť, about 150 m south of the square, 683 23 Ivanovice na Hané, Vyškov district (approximate: pin on the successor building on the same plot).
Abrir mapa ampliado →La comunidad judía
The first written record of Jews in Ivanovice dates from 1576, and the oldest gravestones in the cemetery on the eastern edge of the town are from the early seventeenth century. Originally the Jews lived in two places, one of them near the northern town gate. During the separation measures of 1726 to 1728 they had to leave their homes there and move into a newly built ghetto in the south-west of the town. This quarter covered about 2.1 hectares in a triangular plan: two-storey terraced houses on both sides of Havlíčkova street, houses on both sides of Mlýnská street, and small single-storey blocks around the synagogue in Stará čtvrť, a part locally called Židárna. Gates, chains and wire separated it from the Christian town. Besides the synagogue the quarter held a community house with a school and ritual bath, a matzah bakery and the rabbi's house; of its 53 Jewish houses, 19 survive. The size of the community when the older synagogue burned is unknown; by 1857 it had grown to 483 people, about 23 per cent of the 2,161 inhabitants.
Arquitectura y diseño
No description, drawing, plan or photograph of the older synagogue is known from the sources consulted, so its size, materials, plan and style are all unknown. Klenovský records only that it was built after the Thirty Years' War, that it stood on the plot now occupied by the 1800 synagogue in Stará čtvrť, and that before it there had probably been a wooden prayer house. The surrounding buildings of this part of the ghetto were single-storey houses in the manner of local village dwellings, unlike the two-storey town houses on Havlíčkova street, which suggests a modest setting among small blocks, but nothing about the synagogue's own form can be inferred with confidence. Whether any walls or foundations of the older building were reused when the Empire-style successor, a two-storey hall with a hipped roof on a rectangular plan, was built in 1800 is not recorded. The architect, the builder and the seating capacity of the older synagogue are unknown.
La vida dentro de la sinagoga
No record of services, rabbis, cantors or ritual objects specific to the older synagogue has been found. What is known of religious life in Ivanovice comes from the quarter around it: according to Klenovský the ghetto contained a community house with a school and a ritual bath, a matzah bakery and a house for the rabbi, all close to the synagogue in Stará čtvrť. The Beit Hatfutsot database records that by 1727 the community had a synagogue, a community centre and an active burial society (chevra kaddisha), which places the older synagogue at the heart of an organised congregation during the eighteenth century. The JewishGen cemetery survey names a rabbi Elias Karpeles who lived in the town, but gives no dates, so it is not known whether he served in the older building or in its successor. The literary historian Gustav Karpeles, born in Ivanovice in 1848, came from this family background, decades after the older synagogue had burned.
Destrucción
Klenovský states that the older synagogue ceased to exist in 1799 after an extensive fire ("Zanikla v roce 1799 po rozsáhlém požáru"). The JewishGen cemetery survey also records a major fire in Ivanovice in 1799, without describing its effect on the Jewish quarter. Neither source says how the fire started, whether it spread from elsewhere in the town or began in the synagogue, whether anyone was blamed, or whether Torah scrolls and furnishings were saved. Nothing indicates that the building was deliberately attacked; the sources describe the loss only as the result of the fire. The plot was reused: one year after the fire the community built a new synagogue in the Empire style on the same site, which places its construction in about 1800. The new building was repaired in 1846 and served for worship until the 1930s.
El destino de la comunidad
After the older synagogue burned, the community rebuilt and continued to grow until the mid-nineteenth century, reaching 483 people in 1857. After emancipation in 1848 many families moved to larger towns, and by 1930 only 64 Jews remained; in 1922 the community of about 80 members was led by Hugo Hajek. After the Nazi German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, the Jews of Ivanovice were deported with those of Brno to the Theresienstadt ghetto at the end of 1941, and from there to extermination camps in occupied Poland. Jüdische Gemeinden lists 44 victims from the town. Before the deportations, 25 books and 78 ritual objects of the community were sent to the Central Jewish Museum in Prague. The Ivanovice Jewish religious community ceased to exist in 1942, and Jewish life was not revived after the war.
El lugar hoy
The site of the older synagogue is the plot in Stará čtvrť, about 150 metres south of the town square, where its successor, built in 1800, still stands. That building served as a synagogue until the 1930s, was later used by a glassworks and as a warehouse, and in 1951 was bought from the baker Alois Donnebaum by the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, which converted it into a Hus congregation hall to a design by the architect Vilém Zavřel, removing the original Empire ark. The church still uses it. Nothing of the older synagogue is visible. Nineteen of the 53 houses of the former Jewish quarter survive around it, and the Jewish cemetery lies on the eastern edge of the town.
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