Old Synagogue of Kyjov

הקהילה היהודית

Jews probably settled in Kyjov in the sixteenth century, although the first official records of them date from later. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that the community already existed when a charter of 1613 protected its rights, and that it was allowed to stay in 1650 when Jews were expelled from newer settlements. About 200 Jews lived in the town around 1650. In 1688 they held twelve houses, and in 1696 the Christian townspeople petitioned Emperor Leopold I to expel them, without success. A compromise of 1651 allowed the Jews to distil spirits, and in 1727, under Charles VI, they were confined to a separate quarter. Under the Familiants Laws the number of Jewish families permitted in Kyjov was fixed at 74. Numbers nevertheless grew: 331 Jews in 1792, 427 in 1830 and 510 in 1848, when the Jewish quarter became a separate political municipality. In 1848 the congregation had 94 contributing members and in 1852, the year the old synagogue was replaced, 121.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

No description, plan or picture of the old synagogue was found in the sources consulted, so its size, materials, plan and style are unknown. The only physical detail recorded is an inscription on its ceiling bearing the date 1507, reported by the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906; this suggests a ceiling, perhaps of wood, that carried painted or carved lettering, as in other early Moravian synagogues, but that is an inference, not a documented fact. The architect and builder are unknown. The building stood in the Jewish street, today Židovská, near the town hall, on the plot later used for the synagogue of 1852. Whether parts of the old fabric, such as foundations or walls, were reused in the new building is not recorded; the sources say only that the new synagogue was built in place of the old one after the old one was torn down.

החיים בבית הכנסת

Little is recorded about worship in the old building itself. The Jewish Encyclopedia reports that the community's memorial book (Memorbuch) listed twenty rabbis of Gaya, so a long line of rabbis taught in this synagogue. Among those named are Isaac of Janow, author of the work Pene Yitzhak Zuta, printed in Amsterdam in 1731, and Josef Weisse, who became rabbi of Gaya in 1845 and served the congregation in the old building during its last years, before leaving for Waag-Neustadtl (Nové Mesto nad Váhom) in 1855. The community was self-governing in religious matters and, from 1727, lived as a separate corporation within the town. It kept an old cemetery, later supplemented by a new one, and in later years a school building with four classrooms. Further detail on the furnishings, the women's gallery, seating or the ark of the old synagogue was not found.

הרס

The old synagogue was not destroyed by violence. By 1848 the congregation had grown to more than 500 people, and the building, which by then was two or three centuries old, appears to have become too small. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that it was torn down in 1851, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica likewise records its demolition in 1851. The community then built a new synagogue on the same site in 1851-52, which was dedicated in 1852; the German reference works describe the new building as erected in place of the temple that had stood there since about 1610. No source consulted names the builder who took the old building down, gives the reason in the community's own words, or says whether any materials or fittings, such as the inscribed ceiling, were kept or reused. The demolition was therefore a planned replacement carried out for the congregation itself.

גורל הקהילה

The community peaked at about 880 people in 1869 and then declined, to 620 in 1900 and 319 in 1930. During the First World War some 6,000 Jewish refugees stayed in and around the town. After the German occupation of the Czech lands in March 1939, the Nazis used a former refugee camp near Kyjov as a collection point for the Jews of the town and district. In early 1943 about 2,800 Jews from the region were deported to Theresienstadt in several transports; the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 2,852 people in three transports, and the Jüdische Gemeinden site speaks of four. Later that year most of them were sent on to Auschwitz and murdered. Only a few people returned. The fittings of the 1852 synagogue were taken to the Central Jewish Museum in Prague. After the war Kyjov became the centre of a regional Jewish community, which still had about 300 members in 1959.

האתר כיום

The site of the old synagogue is the same plot on which the synagogue of 1852 stood, in Židovská street close to the town hall in the centre of Kyjov. That later building was demolished in the early 1960s in the course of urban renewal, so nothing of either synagogue survives above ground. No archaeological investigation of the site is recorded in the sources consulted. Since 2002 a memorial stone in the shape of a Star of David has marked the site of the synagogue. The map pin for this entry uses the published coordinates of that memorial and therefore marks the plot only approximately.

שמות בולטים