Kežmarok Hasidic Kloiz

La comunidad judía

Jews were long barred from the royal town and lived in nearby Huncovce; only after the restrictions on residence were lifted in the mid-nineteenth century did they settle in Kežmarok itself. The census counted 29 Jews in 1831, 272 in 1869, 659 in 1890, 907 in 1900, 1,145 in 1919, 1,166 in 1930 and 1,181 in 1940. The kehilla was set up in 1852 and first prayed in a small building behind the town walls near the wooden Protestant church. In 1874 Rabbi Abraham Grünberg came from Miskolc; he founded a yeshiva and served until his death in 1918, when his son Simha Natan Grünberg succeeded him. The community was Orthodox. Hasidism reached the town with the refugees from Galicia who arrived during the First World War, and a Sanz Hasidic congregation formed under Rabbi Aryeh Leib Halberstamm, a great-grandson of Rabbi Haim of Sanz who had been rebbe of Muszyna across the Polish border. It remained a minority within the community, praying apart in its own kloiz.

Arquitectura y diseño

No exterior view, plan or description of the building has been found, so its size, materials and location in the town are unknown. The only image is a colour photograph of the interior, published on the KehilaLinks Kežmarok page beside the text on the kloiz and probably the one Yitzchak Rimpler took in 1983. It shows the east wall of a rendered hall. At the centre stands the Torah ark under a valance, framed by pilasters and an entablature painted to imitate grey marble, with red drapery behind and a painted semicircular lunette above. Higher still, under a broad arch, is a round window with leaded glazing and painted figures on either side. Two tall rectangular windows flank the ark wall, filled with leaded glass forming Stars of David, partly in yellow and blue glass, and painted Stars of David decorate the wall between them. In the foreground is the bimah, enclosed by a turned wooden balustrade with ball finials. KehilaLinks says the kloiz was built as a separate place of prayer, and the hall in the photograph, with its own windows and ark wall, is consistent with a building of its own.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

The kloiz was the prayer house of the Sanz Hasidim, a congregation that differed from the town's established Orthodox community in its Galician origins, its dress and its allegiance to a rebbe of the Halberstamm dynasty. KehilaLinks calls Rabbi Aryeh Leib Halberstamm the 'Mushene Rebbe', after his earlier seat at Muszyna, and says the house was built specifically for him and his followers. A book from his library, sold at auction in Jerusalem, bears his stamp as former rabbi of Muszyna now living in Kežmarok. Pinkas Hakehillot gives the kloiz some two hundred seats. After 1945 it took on a new role: the few survivors cleaned and refurbished it and made it ready for communal prayer, and it served alongside a prayer room in the renovated community building. Pinkas Hakehillot says prayer services in Kežmarok continued until the 1970s, after the last rabbi, Meir Grünberg, emigrated and the community came under the Košice rabbinate. In 1983 the photograph of the interior still showed books and textiles on the reader's desk.

Destrucción

No damage to the kloiz during the Second World War is recorded. In 1941 groups of local Germans broke into the Great Synagogue twice, smashing its windows and desecrating Torah scrolls, but the sources say nothing of the kloiz, and after the war it was in a state to be refurbished for prayer. It was still standing in 1983, when Yitzchak Rimpler of New York photographed its interior on a visit to Kežmarok. KehilaLinks states that the building no longer exists and that it was destroyed by the Communists. The demolition therefore took place between 1983 and the end of Communist rule in 1989. No source found gives the year, the body that ordered the demolition or the reason, and the site has not been located. The Great Synagogue, the beit midrash and the mikveh of Kežmarok were also lost; the Great Synagogue was demolished in 1961 for the road to Levoča.

El destino de la comunidad

In 1940 Kežmarok had 1,181 Jews. In 1942 the deportations began: young women were seized in March, young men in early April, and larger transports followed on 30 April and 1 June. Pinkas Hakehillot estimates that about three quarters of the Jews of Kežmarok and its district were deported that year to death camps and ghettos in Poland; in June men fit for work were sent to Majdanek and women, children and the elderly to Sobibor. About 118 Jews remained in early 1944. In September 1944 Nazi SS forces, helped by local Germans, took control of the town; local Nazis seized some thirty Jews on 2 September, and about forty found in hiding were taken to the border and shot on 22 September; Rabbi Simha Natan Grünberg and his family were among them. Rabbi Aryeh Leib Halberstamm perished in 1943, according to the Encyclopedia L'Chassidut as cited by Kedem Auctions. Survivors began returning in February 1945 and the community reached about two hundred; after emigration in 1948, 142 remained. Services ended in the 1970s.

El lugar hoy

The location of the kloiz has not been found in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what stands on its site today. KehilaLinks gives no street, and the Slovak gazetteers of synagogues and lost monuments read for this entry do not list the building. The map pin is therefore a placeholder at the centre of Kežmarok and should not be read as the kloiz's position. Of Kežmarok's Jewish buildings, the Great Synagogue, the beit midrash and the mikveh are all gone; the mikveh site is now a laundry. The Jewish cemetery on Tehelná Street survives and was restored in 2004-2005. Locating the kloiz will need the Kežmarok town archive, cadastral maps of the 1970s and 1980s or the memories of former residents.

Nombres destacados