Old Synagogue of Kurima

OVERVIEW

The story of Old Synagogue of Kurima

Kurima is a village in the Bardejov district of north-eastern Slovakia, in the historic county of Šariš, close to the Polish border. Jews from Galicia settled across Šariš and neighbouring Zemplín from the eighteenth century, and Kurima grew into one of the larger rural Jewish communities of the region. The synagogue described here is the community's earliest documented house of prayer. Almost everything about it is lost. The architectural historian Maroš Borský, in his 2005 Heidelberg dissertation on synagogue architecture in Slovakia, records in a footnote that the synagogue in Kurima was demolished in 1810. He took the fact from Soňa Kovačevičová's 1972 survey of wooden churches in Slovakia, which covered the wooden places of worship of Roman Catholic, Greek-rite, Lutheran and Jewish congregations. Borský cites the note in his discussion of wooden synagogues, naming Kurima with Čirč and Pečovská Nová Ves as places where only limited information about wooden synagogues survives, so the building was most probably of timber. When it was built, how large it was and where in the village it stood are not recorded in any source read. It should not be confused with the later Kurima synagogue, a simple free-standing building of the nineteenth century with a three-doorway west front, which stood until after the Second World War.

LOCATION

Where it stood

Historic: Kurima, Šariš county, Kingdom of Hungary; street and plot unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of the village of Kurima, okres Bardejov, Prešovský kraj, 086 12 (approximate).

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The Jewish community

Borský describes the eastern Slovak Jewish settlement as the work of Galician Jews who came over the Carpathian passes and settled first in the countryside of Šariš and Zemplín, mostly on the estates of noble landowners, without organised communities; only in 1785-1787 did the first larger communities form, at Huncovce, Pečovská Nová Ves, Šebeš-Kelemeš and Humenné. Kurima's Jews belonged to this wave, and a congregation existed there early enough to have a synagogue standing before 1810. No figures for the community at that date were found. A century later it was among the larger Jewish communities of Slovakia: Borský's analysis of the 1910 census places Kurima among the towns and villages with 500 to 1,000 Jewish inhabitants, alongside Rimavská Sobota, Sečovce and Huncovce. He calls it a Hasidic community located deep in the forests close to Polish territory. Two Jewish cemeteries are recorded in the village, the older with nineteenth-century sandstone tombstones. The names of the community's founders, rabbis and leaders in the period of the old synagogue are unknown.

Architecture and design

No image, plan or description of the Old Synagogue of Kurima has been found, and Borský states that no wooden synagogue survives anywhere in Slovakia. The only indication of its construction is the context of the record: the date of demolition comes from Kovačevičová's study of wooden churches, and Borský uses it to illustrate how little is known about wooden synagogues in the country. The building was therefore probably a timber structure. Borský adds that the two wooden synagogues of Slovakia for which pictures exist, at Veličná and Brezovica nad Torysou, followed the same forms and spatial arrangement as masonry synagogues, carrying the traditional synagogue scheme into wood: a prayer hall with the Torah ark on the east wall, a central bimah and a separate space for women. Whether the Kurima building followed that pattern is unknown. Its date of construction, size, roof form, builder, seating capacity and furnishings are all unknown, and no fragment of it is known to survive.

Life inside the synagogue

Nothing is recorded about worship in the old synagogue: no rabbi, cantor, community officer or member who prayed there has been identified in any source read, and no account of services, study or festivals in the building is known. What can be said comes from the wider context. The Jews of Šariš in the late eighteenth century were mostly recent arrivals from Galicia, observant and traditional, and in the following century the region came under strong Hasidic influence from Poland; Borský describes the later Kurima congregation as Hasidic. The old synagogue would have served the daily, Sabbath and festival prayers of a small rural congregation, whose dead were later buried in the village's own Jewish cemeteries. Whether this building also housed study or a school, and how the congregation was organised before 1810, are not documented.

Destruction

The only record of the end of the building is the statement, repeated by Borský from Kovačevičová's 1972 survey, that the synagogue in Kurima was demolished in 1810. Neither author gives a reason or names who carried out the demolition, and the original record Kovačevičová used is not identified in the footnote. Who pulled the building down, and why, is not recorded. The most likely explanation, though one no source states, is that the community replaced an old or unsound timber building, since a congregation of its size continued to need a synagogue, and a later free-standing synagogue is documented in the village in the nineteenth century. Whether that later building was put up straight away or after some years, and whether it stood on the same plot, is unknown. Neither source mentions a fire or any other damage before the demolition.

The community’s fate

The Kurima congregation survived the loss of its first synagogue by well over a century. It built a new synagogue in the nineteenth century and by 1910 numbered between 500 and 1,000 Jews. Its end came in the Holocaust. The Slovak State, governed by a regime allied to Nazi Germany under Jozef Tiso, stripped Jews of their rights and in 1942 deported tens of thousands of Slovak Jews to the death camps in occupied Poland; after the suppression of the Slovak National Uprising in 1944, Nazi German forces and their Slovak collaborators killed or deported many of those who remained. Borský puts the number of Slovak Jews who died at 105,000. How many Jews still lived in Kurima in 1942, when they were deported and how many survived could not be established from the sources read. The later synagogue was demolished after the Second World War.

The site today

The site of the Old Synagogue of Kurima is unknown. No source read gives its street, plot or neighbourhood, and nothing of it is known to survive above ground. The heritage portal Pamiatky na Slovensku gives a position for the later nineteenth-century synagogue, which was demolished after the Second World War, but there is no evidence that the earlier building stood on the same plot. The map pin for this entry is therefore a placeholder at the centre of the village. The two Jewish cemeteries of Kurima are the only Jewish sites in the village recorded as surviving.

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