Wooden Synagogue of Janów Trembowelski

Еврейская община

Jews are first mentioned in Janów in a document of 1628, and an organised community existed by the early seventeenth century. In 1765 the kahal counted 390 Jews in the town and its surrounding villages. The community grew through the nineteenth century to 848 Jews in 1860 and a peak of 998 in 1880. Emigration then reduced it to 749 in 1900 and 525 in 1921. In the interwar years Janów was a small town in the Trembowla district of Poland's Tarnopol province. In 1939 about 22 per cent of its roughly 2,650 inhabitants were Jewish; most of the rest were Polish and Ukrainian. The community kept its own rabbinate from at least the eighteenth century, a cemetery and several houses of prayer. The wooden synagogue, the oldest of these, stood in the town centre, where an 1828 cadastral map marks two synagogues.

Архитектура и дизайн

The synagogue was a log building on a stone base, with a square prayer hall measuring about 10.20 by 10.20 metres. Its walls rose 6.60 metres, and the wooden vault inside reached about 10.60 metres at its highest point. Each wall had two groups of two round-arched windows, and the doors were also round-arched. The windows on the west wall were blocked when the masonry annex was built. That annex, probably added between 1750 and 1800, was planned without regard to the older hall, so the ceiling of the women's prayer room cut across the western windows halfway up. Inside, the bimah stood in the centre of the hall, between the entrance and the steps to the Torah ark. The ark, dated 1795, rose about 6.5 metres, had multicoloured columns and was crowned by a bronze eagle. Measured drawings of the building by the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences record its plan, section and appearance.

Жизнь в синагоге

The synagogue was the oldest of four houses of prayer in interwar Janów. A memoir by Yitzchak Kahana, published in the 1981 Trembowla yizkor book, remembers the 'Shul' as the oldest and finest, built of wood and lit by electricity. The others were the old kloyz used by the poor, the newer beit midrash of the better-off and the old beit midrash where workmen prayed. On Friday evenings shops closed and the town's Jews walked together to welcome the Sabbath. The rabbinate of Janów was held by a line of Galician scholars. Eliezer Lipman came from Żółkiew in 1775, and Dov Berish Segal taught Torah in the town for decades. Abraham Moses Summerstein served from 1875 to 1878. Shimon Babad, son-in-law of the Maharsham of Brzeżany, served for many years before moving to Budzanów in 1909. Haim Shechter was rabbi, and also a ritual slaughterer, in the last decade before the Holocaust.

Разрушение

Soviet forces occupied Janów on 17 September 1939, and German troops took the town on 5 July 1941. The sources consulted agree that the wooden synagogue was destroyed during the Second World War. A standard list of wooden synagogues gives 1941 as the year it was lost, at the start of the German occupation. No account seen for this entry names the unit or individuals responsible, or says whether the building was burned, pulled down or taken apart for timber. Local histories record that during the occupation the town's entire Jewish population was killed and Jewish houses were burned. The Nazi German occupation authorities, who ruled the area as part of the District of Galicia until the Red Army returned on 22 March 1944, therefore bear responsibility for the conditions in which the synagogue disappeared. The exact circumstances remain undocumented.

Судьба общины

Early in the German occupation, in the summer of 1941, many Jews of Janów were shot. In late 1942 the German authorities ordered the community to move within three days into the ghetto at Trembowla, about 10 kilometres away. Janów's Jews shared the fate of that ghetto. In the action of 5 November 1942 its inmates were deported to the Bełżec death camp. Few of those who remained survived. About twenty Jews from Janów survived in hiding. Thirteen of them were sheltered by the Ukrainian farmer Vladik Krivoruka and his family, whom JewishGen's town page honours as rescuers. After liberation in March 1944 the few survivors found strong hostility. A memoirist recalled that only three of dozens of Jewish children came back to school. The survivors soon left for larger cities, and later for Israel or elsewhere. No Jewish community exists in Dolyna today.

Место сегодня

Nothing of the wooden synagogue is known to survive. Historic Janów is now the village of Dolyna in the Terebovlia community of Ternopil Oblast, Ukraine. It is much smaller than the pre-war town, and the ruins of Janów castle survive nearby. The synagogue's exact plot has not been identified in the sources consulted for this entry. An 1828 cadastral map in the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv, published by Gesher Galicia, marks two synagogues in the centre of the town around the market square. That map could be used to find the site. The measured drawings in Warsaw and pre-war photographs are the main surviving record of the building.

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