La historia de Kunszentmiklós Synagogue
Kunszentmiklós lies in the northern Kiskunság, in present-day Bács-Kiskun county, about 56 km south of Budapest. Its Jewish community was never large. A cemetery was opened in 1853, which suggests an organised congregation from at least the middle of the nineteenth century, and Gazda's survey of 1980-87 records 339 Jews in the town in 1910 and 155 in 1941.
The synagogue is known almost entirely from one source. Anikó Gazda, who surveyed the synagogues and Jewish communities of Hungary between 1980 and 1987, lists a synagogue at Kunszentmiklós built in 1898 and records it as demolished at the time of her survey; she adds that it was renovated in 1922, a date taken from the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929. She gives no address, no description and no demolition date, and she rates her own data as 80 to 90 per cent accurate. No photograph, postcard, plan or description of the building was found in the collections searched, including the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, whose online catalogue holds only a picture of the town's Jewish cemetery. The Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities in Hungary (Pinkas Hakehillot) has an entry for Kunszentmiklós on page 489, but it has not been translated online and was not read. The synagogue's builder, size, appearance, street and fate are therefore unknown, and this entry records only what can be shown: that it was built in 1898 and had disappeared by the 1980s.
Where it stood for 89 years
Historic: Kunszentmiklós, Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun county; street and house number unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of 6090 Kunszentmiklós, Bács-Kiskun county (approximate).
Abrir mapa ampliado →La comunidad judía
Little is known about the Jews of Kunszentmiklós. The earliest firm date is 1853, the year given for the founding of the Jewish cemetery, which lies south of the historic centre behind the new municipal cemetery on Kölcsey utca and covers 0.41 hectares. Its 100 to 500 gravestones date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and carry Hebrew and Hungarian inscriptions, and the cemetery has separate sections for Kohanim, for children and for wealthier families. That the community built a synagogue in 1898 implies that it was then large and prosperous enough to need one of its own. Gazda's survey of 1980-87 records 339 Jews in 1910 and 155 in 1941, so the community roughly halved between those censuses; JewishGen gives the same pre-war figure of 155. The survey of the cemetery in 1991 named the Budapest Orthodox community as the responsible regional body, which may indicate that the congregation was Orthodox, but no source read states its religious affiliation directly. The names of its rabbis, cantors and lay leaders were not found.
Arquitectura y diseño
No image or description of the Kunszentmiklós synagogue was found, so nothing reliable can be said about its form. The only architectural facts on record are the date of construction, 1898, and a renovation in 1922, both given in Anikó Gazda's survey of Hungarian synagogues. Beneath the row her table prints the name János Bobula, in the position where it gives architects' names, which probably names him as the designer, though the alignment of the printed table is not certain. Gazda classed the building as a synagogue proper, as opposed to a prayer house in a private dwelling, which suggests a free-standing building put up for worship. Synagogues built in small Hungarian towns in the 1890s were often modest rendered halls with a decorated street gable, but whether this one followed that pattern is unknown. The architect and builder, the building materials, the seating capacity, the arrangement of the women's gallery and the position of the ark are all unknown. Picture postcards of Kunszentmiklós in the Szerencs postcard collection show the Reformed and Catholic churches and the town hall, but none that was checked is captioned as showing the synagogue.
La vida dentro de la sinagoga
No account of religious life in the Kunszentmiklós synagogue was found. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929, which usually names a community's rabbi, its officers, its schools and its societies, was not consulted directly, and the Hungarian-language entry of the Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities was not available in translation. For that reason the names of the rabbis who preached in the synagogue, of its cantors and of its presidents are unknown, as are the existence of a Jewish school, a burial society or a women's association. The cemetery records give only indirect hints: its sections for Kohanim and for children reflect the observance of traditional burial rules, and the regional responsibility of the Budapest Orthodox community in 1991 points to an Orthodox rite, though this is not confirmed by any source describing the congregation itself.
Destrucción
No source found describes damage to the Kunszentmiklós synagogue during the Second World War or records what became of the building after its congregation was deported in 1944. Many synagogues in small Hungarian towns were left empty after the war and were sold or pulled down in the following decades, but no document showing this building standing after 1945 was found, and no sale, demolition permit or photograph of the ruin could be traced. The only evidence for its destruction is Anikó Gazda's survey of 1980 to 1987, which marks the synagogue as demolished. The date of the demolition is therefore known only as some time before 1987, and who ordered or carried out the demolition is not recorded in any source consulted.
El destino de la comunidad
Gazda's survey records 155 Jews in Kunszentmiklós in 1941, the same pre-war figure that JewishGen gives. No source read describes what happened to them in 1944: the ghetto in which they were held, the route by which they were deported and the number who were murdered are not recorded in the sources consulted. No Jewish community was re-established in the town. The JewishGen cemetery survey of 1991 records that no Jews live in Kunszentmiklós today and that the cemetery, which contains memorials to Holocaust victims, is owned by the national Jewish community but has no caretaker, no fence and no sign, and is overgrown.
El lugar hoy
Because the synagogue's street and plot are not recorded in any source consulted, it is not possible to say what stands on the site today, and no surviving fragment of the building is known. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Kunszentmiklós and does not mark the synagogue. The town's Jewish cemetery survives south of the historic centre behind the municipal cemetery on Kölcsey utca; in 1991 it was neglected, with between a quarter and a half of its gravestones toppled or broken, and it contains memorials to the Holocaust victims. Locating the synagogue will need old cadastral maps, the town's local-history collection or the Pinkas Hakehillot entry.
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