Historia Ješín Synagogue
Ješín is a small village in Central Bohemia, about 20 km north-west of Prague, which today belongs to the town of Velvary in Kladno district. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was the seat of a rural Jewish community of the kind once common in the Bohemian countryside. Jiří Fiedler, whose survey of Jewish monuments in Bohemia and Moravia remains the standard reference, writes that the community was of unknown age and existed until the second half of the nineteenth century. He calls the building he records the community's last synagogue, which implies that earlier prayer houses had stood in the village before it, and he dates it, with some hesitation, to the first half of the nineteenth century.
The congregation's most lasting monument is not in Ješín itself but in the neighbouring village of Blevice, where its cemetery survives. After 1848, when Bohemian Jews gained freedom of movement, families from villages such as Ješín moved to towns like Velvary and Kralupy nad Vltavou, and the Ješín community gradually dissolved; the cemetery passed to the Velvary congregation. The synagogue outlived its congregation by about a century. Fiedler records that it was demolished after 1970. No photograph, plan or description of the building was found, and its exact plot in the village is not known.
Where it stood for nearly 120 years
Historic: Ješín, Velvary area, Bohemia; house number unknown. Today: unidentified plot in Ješín, part of Velvary, Kladno district, 273 21, Central Bohemian Region (approximate: village-centre pin).
Otwórz większą mapę →Społeczność żydowska
Little is recorded about the Jews of Ješín. Fiedler gives the age of the community as unknown, while the JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project, drawing on Czech sources, says the congregation was probably established in the second half of the eighteenth century. Its burial ground lay about 7 km to the south-east at Blevice, a village that never had a Jewish community of its own. According to the Jewish Community of Prague, which owns and maintains it, that cemetery was probably founded in the first half of the seventeenth century, was enlarged several times, and served the Jewish community of Ješín and later that of Velvary; Fiedler gives the oldest legible gravestone as dating from 1720. Its roughly 300 surviving headstones, in Baroque and Classicist forms, are the main physical trace of the Ješín Jews. After the emancipation of 1848 the community's members left for the growing towns nearby, chiefly Velvary and Kralupy nad Vltavou, and Fiedler says the community ceased to exist in the second half of the nineteenth century. The 1930 census found only three Jews living in Ješín.
Architektura i projekt
No photograph, drawing, plan or written description of the Ješín synagogue was found in the sources consulted, so its appearance is unknown. Fiedler's short entry says only that the last synagogue was perhaps built in the first half of the nineteenth century; the word 'perhaps' shows that even the date is uncertain. Because he describes it as the last synagogue, the community evidently had at least one earlier place of worship, whose location and form are also unknown. Fiedler uses the word synagogue rather than prayer room (modlitebna), the term he applies to the places of worship recorded in nearby Koleč and Mikovice, which suggests a separate building, but its size, materials and style are not recorded. For comparison, the synagogue of nearby Kamýk, also from the first half of the nineteenth century, was later rebuilt as a house. The architect, builder, seating capacity and interior arrangement of the Ješín synagogue are unknown.
Życie w synagodze
No account of worship or communal life in the Ješín synagogue was found. What can be said comes from the community's wider circumstances. It was a small rural congregation whose members lived in a farming village outside the towns, a pattern common in Bohemia before 1848, when residence rights for Jews were restricted. Its religious needs were met by the synagogue in the village and their own cemetery at Blevice, where a cemetery house was later built and the pedestrian gate bears the date 1885. As members moved to Velvary and Kralupy in the second half of the nineteenth century, regular services in the village presumably came to an end, though no date is recorded; the names of its rabbis, teachers, cantors and lay leaders have not been found. Velvary, where many Ješín families settled, built a new functionalist synagogue in 1930 and 1931, which still stands and is now an art school.
Zniszczenie
The Ješín synagogue was not destroyed in the Second World War. By then the community that had used it had long since dissolved, and the building had presumably been put to other uses or left empty, although no source says which. Fiedler records that the synagogue was demolished after 1970, that is, in the period of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. He gives no exact year, no reason for the demolition and no indication of who owned the building at the time or who ordered or carried out the work. No municipal record, newspaper report or photograph of the demolition was found. Who demolished the synagogue is not recorded in the sources consulted. It is also not known whether the building was still recognisable as a synagogue in its last years, as many former village synagogues in the region had by then been converted into houses or farm buildings.
Los społeczności
The Ješín Jewish community did not end through persecution but through migration. Freedom of movement after 1848 drew its families to the nearby towns, above all Velvary and Kralupy nad Vltavou, and Fiedler states that the community ceased to exist in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the 1930 census only three Jews still lived in Ješín. Their names and their fate during the Nazi German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia are unknown. The Velvary town chronicle records, under 1941 and the Nazi occupation, the tragic fate of the Jews of Velvary and their departure abroad, and many descendants of Ješín families had settled in Velvary. The Blevice cemetery, where Ješín Jews had once been buried, received its last burial in 1945, the grave of the estate manager Julius Munk. No source consulted traces the Ješín families individually through the Holocaust, and how many of their descendants were murdered or survived is unknown. No Jewish community was re-established in Ješín after the war.
Miejsce dzisiaj
The site of the synagogue has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what stands there today. The Jewish Community of Prague's register of Jewish monuments in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia has no entry for a synagogue in Ješín, which agrees with Fiedler's statement that the building no longer exists. The map pin for this entry is placed at the centre of the village and does not mark the synagogue's plot. The community's cemetery at Blevice, about 7 km to the south-east, survives, locked and maintained by the Jewish Community of Prague, with its headstones restored since 2009. Locating the synagogue will need the stable cadastre maps of the nineteenth century or local knowledge in Velvary.
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Zdjęcia, dokumenty, historie rodzinne lub wspomnienia o tej synagodze i jej społeczności pomagają zachować jej historię.
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