Kroměříž Synagogue

The Jewish community

A royal privilege of 1322 allowed the bishop of Olomouc to keep a Jew in Kroměříž, the first record of Jewish settlement, and a small community with a prayer room probably existed by the early fifteenth century. Jews expelled from Olomouc in 1454 found refuge here. Swedish troops plundered and burned the town and a synagogue in 1642 during the Thirty Years' War, destroying more than thirty Torah scrolls. In 1670 families expelled from Vienna settled under the bishop's protection, and from about 1680 a walled quarter of some 35 houses grew up, with a Jewish town hall built in 1687 and 1688. Rabbis included Menahem Mendel Krochmal (1636 to 1642) and Issachar Berush Eskeles (1710 to 1719). In the eighteenth century the community became poorer and wealthy families left. It numbered 546 people in 1829 and reached its peak of 783 in 1880, about 6.6 per cent of the town. Blood-libel accusations caused unrest in 1889 and 1896. Emigration to the cities then reduced it to 611 in 1900, 392 in 1921 and 382 in 1930, when the synagogue was barely twenty years old.

Architecture and design

Jakob Gartner, who also designed synagogues in Olomouc, Opava, Holešov, Debrecen and Vienna, gave Kroměříž a free-standing, centrally planned building. Sources describe its style differently: the town's heritage trail calls the façade Neo-Romanesque with an Art Nouveau (Secession) interior, while a local history summary calls it Oriental-Byzantine. Construction was carried out by the builder Ladislav Mesenský under the engineer Friedrich Khünl. Historical views show a rendered entrance front under a broad gable filled by a large rose window with eight petal-shaped lights, framed by a Hebrew inscription. Below it three round-arched doorways open onto a flight of steps. Two slender corner towers with round-arched windows and steep pointed roofs topped by Stars of David flank the gable, and a ribbed dome on a drum, with a small lantern and a third spire, rises over the centre. Lower side wings with round-arched windows extend to each side. Gartner's drawings, including elevations, sections and a ground plan, survive; one cross-section bears revenue stamps and Hebrew inscriptions. The seating capacity and the interior arrangement are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

Very little has been found about worship in the new building itself. The congregation's best-known modern rabbi, the historian Adolf Frankl-Grün, served from 1877 to 1911, so he led the community through the planning and dedication of the synagogue and into its first year of use. He wrote on the history of the Kroměříž Jews and on theological subjects. Nearly forty rabbis are recorded across the history of the town's synagogues, many of them from abroad. A Talmud Torah school still operated in the early twentieth century, and during the First World War the community helped Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. The synagogue and the community house had long displayed the coat of arms of the bishop of Olomouc as a sign of the community's protected status. The last rabbi was Joachim Astel, who came from Tachov in 1934 and served until the deportations. After the occupation of 1939 ritual slaughter was banned. The synagogue's furnishings were later taken to the Central Jewish Museum in Prague, which suggests they were removed before the building was destroyed.

Destruction

By 1940 the Kroměříž congregation had practically ceased to function under the anti-Jewish measures of the Nazi German occupation, and the synagogue was earmarked for demolition. After the deportations of June 1942 it stood empty. Its ritual objects and fittings were sent to the Central Jewish Museum in Prague, and the building was then plundered. According to a local history summary, the German occupation authorities ordered it to be blown up with dynamite on 5 November 1942. The director of the State District Archive in Kroměříž has said that the demolition was carried out by a German garrison, which had great difficulty bringing the solid building down and had to repeat the blasting several times. Local residents afterwards carried off building material from the ruins. The Jüdische Gemeinden site states simply that the synagogue was demolished in 1942 on the orders of the German occupying power. The perpetrators were therefore Nazi German forces acting on the orders of the occupation authorities; no Czech body is recorded as taking part.

The community’s fate

After the Nazi German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 the Jews of Kroměříž were subjected to the Protectorate's anti-Jewish laws, although, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the Czech population paid little attention to the measures of 1940. About 350 Jews were living in the town in the mid-1930s. At the end of June 1942 almost all who remained were deported. The sources read do not give the route or first destination of the transport. The last rabbi, Joachim Astel, is recorded as having died in Auschwitz in 1942. Between 259 and 268 Jews from Kroměříž were murdered in the Holocaust, depending on the source, among them entire families; memorial stones (Stolpersteine) for members of the Presser, Loff and Herz families have been laid in the town. After the war a tiny community was re-established and affiliated with Kyjov; it later became a small congregation of believers and ceased to exist after 1980. A memorial of 1962 at the last Jewish cemetery on Velehradská Street honours about 300 Jewish victims from the region.

The site today

The synagogue stood on today's Komenského náměstí, near Tovačovského Street, outside the former Jewish quarter. The site is occupied by the Kroměříž House of Culture (Dům kultury), completed in 1964 under the Communist-era Action Z (Akce Z) building programme. No part of the synagogue survives above ground. In 2016 a large printed image of the synagogue was hung on the front of the House of Culture during its reconstruction, and in 2022 the town displayed a large model of the building. A memorial sculpture by Olbram Zoubek, a mourning woman facing the spot where the synagogue stood, was unveiled nearby in 1994. Much of the old Jewish quarter around Moravcova Street survives, including the Jewish town hall at No. 259 and part of the ghetto wall.

Notable names