Kisbér Synagogue

Społeczność żydowska

Jews settled in Kisbér, a village with market rights, at the end of the eighteenth century, but the 1929 Hungarian Jewish Lexicon records that in the 1840s only one Jewish family, that of Izsák Stern, lived there. More arrived after 1848, and in 1851 there were enough to found a community, buy a cemetery plot and form a Chevra Kadisha. Regular registers were kept from 1853 and statutes were adopted in 1859. The community ran its own school, housed from 1875 in the old prayer house and from 1881 in a larger new building that children of other denominations also attended; it closed after the 1926–27 school year, three years after its state subsidy was withdrawn. The registry district took in Ászár, Ete and Vérteskethely. Anikó Gazda's survey gives 316 Jews in 1910 and 155 in 1941; the lexicon counted 234 people in 72 families in 1929, most of them merchants and artisans, with two doctors and a lawyer, and a county guide gives 198 for 1938. Fifty-nine members served in the First World War and seven fell. The synagogue architect Lipót Baumhorn was born in Kisbér in 1860.

Architektura i projekt

No plans, building accounts or architect's name have been found, so the description rests on a single postcard view. It shows a free-standing, two-storey rectangular block under a hipped roof, set behind a low stone wall along the street. The long side has five tall round-arched windows with small-paned glazing. The entrance front is divided by plain pilaster strips and a string course: a round-arched doorway with a lantern bracket beside it stands at ground level, with paired arched windows to the side, and above them a group of three arched windows flanked by further pairs, which probably lit the women's gallery. The front rises into a stepped attic parapet carrying the Tablets of the Law at the centre and large ball-shaped finials on the piers, the only overtly emblematic feature of an otherwise sober, rendered building. The round-arched manner is typical of small-town Hungarian synagogues of the 1870s. Capacity, dimensions and the interior arrangement are not recorded in the sources consulted.

Życie w synagodze

The congregation followed the Congress, or Neolog, rite and was attached to the twelfth Israelite district, whose presidency sat in Győr; the registers of the National Israelite Office show it sending its statutes for approval in 1881 and applying year after year for state aid for its school and community. A charitable women's society, led in 1929 by Mrs Lipót Kohn, worked beside the burial society. In that year the board consisted of the president Sándor Márkus, the vice-president Adolf Wollner, the treasurer József Fleischmann, the controller Lipót Kohn and the notary József Böhm, and the community spent about 2,600 pengő of its 6,873-pengő budget on welfare. Lázár Moskovits served as rabbi and teacher of religion from 1922, and in December 1940 the National Office thanked him for his pastoral work among Jewish forced-labour servicemen. By April 1944 the congregation had shrunk to 133 people and 37 taxpayers under the presidency of the physician Dr Arthur Böhm, with three employees; the women's society had been dissolved that March.

Zniszczenie

The synagogue was not destroyed during the Second World War. It lost its congregation in the spring of 1944, when the Jews of Kisbér and the surrounding villages were confined in a ghetto in the town and then deported, and it was left without a congregation to maintain it when the community failed to re-form in 1945. The county settlement guide published by the Komárom-Esztergom county pedagogical institute states only that the synagogue was demolished after 1945. The survey of Hungarian synagogues carried out by the architect Anikó Gazda in the 1980s marks both of the community's buildings, the prayer house of 1851 that had been turned into a school and the synagogue of 1875, as demolished. No source found for this entry gives the year of the demolition, the reason for it, or the name of the body or person that ordered or carried it out, so the actor is not recorded. What happened to the furnishings, the Torah scrolls and the Tablets of the Law from the parapet is likewise unknown.

Los społeczności

Nazi German forces occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944; that month the community's women's society was dissolved. Hungarian authorities then set up a ghetto in Kisbér, where the Jews of the town and of the surrounding district were concentrated. According to the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, the people held in the Kisbér ghetto were taken to Fort Monostor at Komárom, where Jews from across the region were crowded together under the guard of gendarmes. Two trains left Komárom on 13 and 16 June 1944 carrying 5,463 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were murdered by the Nazis on arrival. The county settlement guide records simply that the Jews of Kisbér were deported in June 1944 and that the community was not re-established in 1945. How many of the 133 members counted in April 1944 survived, and how many returned to the town, is not stated in the sources consulted. No Jewish community exists in Kisbér today.

Miejsce dzisiaj

The location of the synagogue within Kisbér has not been established for this entry: none of the sources consulted gives a street or plot, and nothing is known of what was built on the site after the demolition. The building is recorded as demolished and no part of it is known to survive. Whether any marker stands on the site is not known. The community's cemetery, opened in 1851, was listed as the property of the burial society, together with a mortuary, in April 1944. The town's official history page today recalls the community in a few lines, noting the synagogue built in 1875 and the deportations of 1944.

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