Kunhegyes Synagogue

The Jewish community

Kunhegyes held a privilege that let it admit or exclude outsiders, and Jews were not permitted to settle in the town until 1848, although Jewish traders had visited since the early nineteenth century. Families then moved in from nearby villages. Most were shopkeepers and merchants, who gradually took over the trade once run by Greek merchants and sold on credit until the harvest; others were craftsmen and farmers, and the community also included four physicians, a lawyer and the owners of two flour mills. The congregation declared itself Orthodox in 1869, was formally organised in the autumn of 1871 and from 1885 came under the supervision of the Karcag community. It maintained a burial society, a women's association and a school. There were 162 Jews in 1880, 312 in 1900 and a peak of 356 in 1920, about three per cent of the population; by 1941 the number had fallen to 224. After 1919 the community suffered repeatedly: local Jews were arrested and tortured during the White Terror, in 1922 Jewish innkeepers lost their licences, and in 1938 merchants and craftsmen lost theirs.

Architecture and design

No architect is recorded; the builders were the contractors Mór Steinberger and András Uhrin and the mason Miklós Schilling. The monument register describes a free-standing, rectangular building under a gable roof, its broken-outline gable crowned by stone Tablets of the Law, with a small porch on two wooden posts before the entrance. Anikó Gazda's survey gives the plan as 10.20 by 18.10 metres with an interior height of 5.25 metres and classes it among longitudinal synagogues with a western gallery. A single wooden barrel vault covered the hall. The west end was divided into two storeys: a narrow corridor led from the door between a side room and a staircase reached from outside, and the women's gallery above projected into the hall on carved, bracketed beams and wooden posts. At the east end a pedimented wooden structure with decorative painting framed the Torah ark, and the reading platform stood in the centre in the Orthodox manner. The walls were at least partly of adobe. A heritage lexicon of 2000 called it a Romantic-eclectic prayer house with a front porch.

Life inside the synagogue

Worship followed the Orthodox rite. Kunhegyes had no rabbi of its own: the rabbis of Karcag, the mother community, came over frequently, and in later years the shochet, the ritual slaughterer, stood in for a rabbi. Men sat in the hall around the central reading platform and women in the wooden gallery at the west end; a few of the original benches were still in place when the building was surveyed. A Jewish school opened in 1893, the same year as the synagogue, and the community also kept a burial society and a women's association. In 1944 the building was put to a very different use: belongings, clothing and valuables confiscated from the Jews by the finance guard were stored in the synagogue, and local rumour held that families had hidden valuables in its walls. After the war the returning survivors reorganised the congregation, and Gazda's survey of the 1980s still listed the building as belonging to the Jewish community. A document placed in the foundation stone came to light when the building was demolished in 2003.

Destruction

The synagogue survived the war and the decades that followed. It outlived its congregation and was lost to neglect rather than to any act of persecution. Gazda's survey of the 1980s recorded it in its original form, and it was a protected monument, register number 10440. By February 1997 the county newspaper reported that the building had lain in ruins for years in the centre of Kunhegyes, the only action taken being warnings painted on it that entry was dangerous. In 1999 a millennium heritage grant of 200,000 forints was awarded for restoration plans, and planning was reported in 2000, but no work followed. The monument register described adobe walls soaked through and crumbling, and a building on the verge of collapse with no one maintaining it. In the early 2000s it partly collapsed and what remained was pulled down; a county history dates the demolition to 2002, the county library's local-history wiki to 2003. The sources consulted do not name who ordered or carried out the demolition. Two lorry-loads of its bricks were reused in restoring the town's Komlósi windmill.

The community’s fate

After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, gendarmes registered the Jews of Kunhegyes, and on 16 May 1944 they were forced into a ghetto in the Hatház quarter near the railway station, a cluster of poor cottages without drinkable water. About 280 people were crowded in, including Jews brought from Abádszalók and neighbouring villages. Two midwives were made to search the women for hidden valuables. On the evening of 16 June 1944 Hungarian gendarmes marched the inmates to the station and sent them by train to the collection camp at the Szolnok sugar factory. From there some were deported to the Nazi German camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where almost all were murdered, and others to Strasshof in Austria for forced labour; 35 people from Kunhegyes were killed at Persenbeug on 2–3 May 1945. Of the town's 228 Jews, 128 did not survive. Roughly a hundred returned and re-formed the congregation, but local hostility drove most to leave, and only 73 remained in 1949. The last Jewish resident, the roofer István Weisz (Váradi), died around 2000.

The site today

The site at Bethlen Gábor utca 6 is an empty plot. A visitor who checked the monument register's coordinates in August 2008 found only a cleared, grassy lot between low houses and noted that the synagogue had been demolished long before as a danger to life. The building nevertheless still appeared on a list of protected Jewish monuments published in 2010, and the register entry still carries its number. The stone Tablets of the Law from the gable were set into a Holocaust memorial unveiled in the Jewish cemetery on 16 May 2004, and bricks from the walls went into the restored Komlósi windmill. OpenStreetMap marks the plot as the site of the former synagogue. Its present ownership and use were not established.

Notable names