Kula Synagogue

The Jewish community

According to the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon, the date of the congregation's founding and the names of its founders were unknown even in 1929, but tombstones in the cemetery and documents in the community archive showed that Jews were already living in Kula at the end of the seventeenth century. Terzić and Bjeljac give 1709 as the year Jews were accepted in Kula and date the Jewish cemetery to 1840. The Jews became an organised congregation only around 1848, and several members enlisted as soldiers in the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848-49. The congregation followed the Congress (Neolog) rite. Its registry district took in Stari and Novi Vrbas, Veprovac (today Kruščić), Crvenka, Nove Šove, Stare Šove and other villages. In 1929 it numbered 90 souls in 30 families, 40 of whom paid community tax, and it had a budget of 31,250 dinars, of which 12,000 went to social purposes. Thirty-three members had served in the First World War and four were killed. The officers in 1929 were Dávid Holländer, president; M. H. Deutsch, vice-president; Ignác Deutsch, warden; Miksa Récsei and Aládár Geisel, auditors; Félix Szegő, secretary; and Adolf Fürst, treasurer.

Architecture and design

Very little is recorded about the building. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 says only that the congregation built a beautiful temple with a monumental exterior, and that it was still standing at that time. The lexicon places its construction at about the time of the 1848 revolution, while the tables of Terzić and Bjeljac (2014) and of the Archives of Vojvodina volume (2021), both resting on Pavle Šosberger's book on the synagogues of Vojvodina, give 1861. The two dates might refer to a first prayer house and a later building, or simply be a disagreement between sources; nothing read settles it. No photograph, postcard, drawing, plan or description of the interior has been found. A turn-of-the-century multi-view postcard of Kula in the Zempléni Múzeum collection shows the town from the south, a factory and the railway station, but its listing does not mention the synagogue. The architect, builder, style, size, seating capacity and the street on which it stood are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

The congregation that worshipped here followed the Congress (Neolog) rite. Its first rabbi was Ábrahám Hochmuth, who later moved to Veszprém and took part in founding the rabbinical seminary in Budapest. The lexicon does not name his successors or say whether Kula still had its own rabbi in the twentieth century. Around the synagogue the community built up the usual institutions of a Hungarian Jewish congregation. A Chevra Kadisha burial society was founded in 1848, the same year the congregation was organised; in 1929 it was headed by Albert Magriso. A women's association was founded in 1890 and in 1929 was led by Mrs Jakab Pollák. The community spent more than a third of its budget on social welfare. Because Kula kept the civil registers of Jewish births, marriages and deaths for the surrounding villages, Jewish families from Vrbas, Crvenka, Kruščić and the Šove villages also looked to Kula as their centre. The cemetery, where about twenty gravestones dated from 1868 to 1921 are still visible, was used until the community was destroyed.

Destruction

No source found records damage to the synagogue during the Hungarian occupation of 1941-44 or during the fighting of 1944, and the lists of demolished synagogues place its end after the war. Terzić and Bjeljac (2014), the Archives of Vojvodina volume (2021) and the English Wikipedia list of synagogues in Serbia all give the year of demolition as 1948, three years into Communist rule in Yugoslavia. The Archives of Vojvodina study states that after the Second World War the authorities built a cooperative hall (zadružni dom) on the site of the demolished synagogue in Kula, and notes that in West Bačka most synagogues were pulled down within a few years of the war's end. Terzić and Bjeljac write in general terms that the postwar destruction of Jewish buildings in Vojvodina was the work of the Communist authorities, but they do not say this of Kula in particular. No document naming who ordered or carried out the demolition, or saying whether the building was first transferred or sold, has been found.

The community’s fate

In 1941 Kula, with the rest of Bačka, was occupied by the Axis and attached to Horthy's Hungary. In April 1944 a Hungarian Interior Ministry order, no. 6163/1944, directed that the Jews of Bačka and Baranja be gathered into ghettos. Documents published by the Archives of Vojvodina describe Jews of the region being held in a school near a railway station, stripped of jewellery, wedding rings and money, and sent on for deportation to Germany. The fate of the Kula Jews in particular, the number taken and the collection point through which they passed, was not found in the sources read; the Archives of Vojvodina's 2021 volume Deportation of the Jews of Bačka in 1944, which includes a register of victims, is the place to look for their names. The European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative states that the local Jewish community was wiped out in the Shoah. No postwar congregation is recorded in Kula. The cemetery is owned by the local community and was re-fenced in November 2025.

The site today

The synagogue's exact site has not been identified in any source read. According to the Archives of Vojvodina study of 2021, the postwar authorities built a cooperative hall (zadružni dom) on the plot where the synagogue had stood, but the study gives no street name and it is not known whether that building still stands or how it is used today. No trace of the synagogue is recorded. The town's Jewish cemetery survives at 76 Stevana Sremca Street, where about twenty gravestones are visible and a ruined pre-burial house stands. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Kula and does not mark the synagogue's location.

Notable names