Jászárokszállás Synagogue

הקהילה היהודית

The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon states that the congregation was formed in 1852 and names its first leaders as Lipót Strasser, Sámuel Schwarc, Mór Friedrich and Mátyás Schweiger. It belonged to the rabbinate of Jászberény until 1890 and then became an independent community. Gazda's gazetteer gives no figures for 1828 or 1851 and counts 249 Jews in 1910 and 165 in 1941. In 1929 the lexicon recorded 185 people in 52 families, of whom 60 paid the community tax, in a town of 13,616 inhabitants: 42 merchants, seven craftsmen, three lawyers, three doctors, a private clerk and a labourer. The annual budget was 7,000 pengő, part of it spent on welfare. The late Ármin Schwarc had founded a brickworks employing about 100 workers; the physician Gyula Katona, the lawyer Lipót Donáth and the merchant Márton Friedrich, the community's president, were prominent in local society. The actor Jenő Balassa of the Vígszínház in Budapest came from the community. Thirty-five members served in the First World War and one was killed. The other officers in 1929 were Adolf Weisz, vice-president; Lajos Berger, treasurer; and Ignác Meisler and Fülöp Künsztler, wardens.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

As photographed in 1955, the synagogue was a free-standing rectangular hall under a tiled pitched roof, its entrance front finished as a broad triangular gable. The walls were rendered, with strips of pale exposed brick at the corners. At ground level the front opened as a recessed porch carried on six plain round columns, single at the ends and paired between, with three tall round-arched doorways behind them. Above the porch were three round-headed windows framed in pale brick, with a small circle in the glazing bars at the top. A cornice with a scalloped edge ran below the gable, which had a small round opening ringed with brick and, beneath it, a pale rectangular patch where a tablet or inscription may once have been. A ball and a Star of David stood on the apex. Inside, the hall was whitewashed. The timber Torah ark on the end wall had a pointed-arched head flanked by slender pinnacles; the reading platform stood in the middle of the floor inside a plain timber railing; and galleries with timber parapets ran along both side walls on timber posts. The architect, the builder and the number of seats are unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

The congregation followed the Congress (Neolog) rite. For its first decades it had no rabbi of its own: until 1890 it was served from Jászberény, and in 1929 the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon noted that the rabbi's post was vacant. Around the synagogue stood the usual institutions of a small-town community. An elementary school opened in 1872, and there were a Chevra Kadisha burial society, a women's association, a poorhouse and a ritual bath. The interior photograph shows how the hall was arranged: the reading platform stood in the centre of the floor, facing the ark, with pews on either side, and the galleries along the side walls would have seated the women. A many-branched metal chandelier hung before the ark, with a pair of candle sconces on the wall beside it. After the war, two framed tablets headed 1944 and Auschwitz were fixed to the wall on either side of the ark, each with several columns of names. Their presence, and the orderly state of the furniture, show that the building was still kept as a synagogue for some years after 1945.

הרס

No source read for this entry records damage to the synagogue during the Second World War, or says who emptied or looted it in 1944. It lost most of its congregation that year, after Nazi Germany occupied Hungary and the Jews of the town were deported. The building survived. Two photographs held by the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, catalogued with the date 1955, show it standing with its roof, doors, ark, reading platform and galleries intact, though several window panes were broken and the render was flaking. Memorial tablets to the dead of 1944 had been put up inside. Anikó Gazda, who surveyed Hungarian synagogue sites between 1980 and 1987, recorded the building as demolished, and the English Wikipedia list of Hungarian synagogues says only that it was demolished after 1945. The demolition therefore took place under Communist rule, at some point between the mid-1950s and the 1980s. None of the sources names the year, says who ordered or carried out the work, or says whether the building had first been sold, so the actor is unknown.

גורל הקהילה

Gazda's gazetteer counts 165 Jews in Jászárokszállás in 1941. How they were rounded up in 1944 is not described in any source read for this entry: whether there was a ghetto in the town, which Hungarian officials and gendarmes carried out the removal, and from which station they were deported are all unknown. Randolph Braham notes that the Jews of neighbouring Jászberény were taken to Monor for deportation, but he does not mention Jászárokszállás in that passage. The best local evidence is the pair of memorial tablets photographed inside the synagogue in 1955. They are headed 1944 and Auschwitz, the Nazi German death camp, and carry roughly 150 names as far as can be counted from the photograph. Family names that can be read include Friedrich, Klein, Katona, Meisler, Strasser and Schwartz, the same families the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon lists among the community's founders and officers. The tablets imply that some survivors returned, but their number is unknown. In the 2011 census four residents declared themselves members of the Jewish religious community, and in 2022 none did.

האתר כיום

The plot on which the synagogue stood has not been identified in any source read for this entry, so it is not possible to say what occupies it today. The 1955 photograph shows the building set back behind a yard with young trees, but it does not show a street name or a neighbouring landmark. No surviving fragment and no marker on the site is recorded in the sources consulted. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Jászárokszállás and should not be read as the synagogue's location. Fixing the address will need a cadastral map, János Herbert's 1927 monograph on the town, which the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon says treats the community's history in detail, or the help of local historians.

שמות בולטים