Levoča Synagogue

La comunità ebraica

Census returns of 1768 and 1828 report that Levoča had no Jews, and settlement seems to have been barred until about 1840. In the 1840s Jews from Huncovce and eastern Slovakia arrived; by 1845 some ten families lived there and a community formed under Samuel Winter, son of Abraham. Numbers rose from 45 in 1848 to 365 in 1869, 718 in 1910 and 579 in 1930. In 1869 the congregation chose status quo affiliation, and in 1928 it joined the liberal Yeshurun association. In 1922 it had about 120 households, roughly 650 people, seven full-time employees and a budget of 80,000 crowns. A Burial Society, Bikur Cholim, a women's association and an orphanage for about 20 children were active. Jews owned some 40 shops and 18 workshops and included seven of the town's twelve doctors. Dr. Bartolomei Rozsnyai, long head of the community, was the region's chief physician. Zionist groups, the Jewish National Party and youth movements flourished between the wars.

Architettura e design

Pinkas Hakehillot Slovakia, the only detailed source read, describes the building of 1899 as a grand and spacious synagogue in the Oriental style; the source gives no further detail of what that style meant here. It stood outside the city's medieval wall, not in the walled historic centre, and was built together with a Jewish school and a mikveh that adjoined it, forming a small communal complex. The school held a five-year course with 60 to 70 pupils, which suggests a building of some size. No photograph, plan or description of the facade or interior was found in this research, so the architect, builder, materials, seating capacity, the arrangement of the women's gallery and the form of the ark are all unknown, and the street on which the complex stood has not been identified.

La vita nella sinagoga

From 1899 the synagogue was the seat of a district rabbinate. Rabbi Dr. Gustav Levi, elected that year, served until his death in 1927, when Rabbi Julius Klein succeeded him as rabbi of the community and the district. The congregation followed the status quo rite and from 1928 was linked to the liberal Yeshurun organisation. Jews from four nearby villages belonged to it. The adjoining school, which taught in German and from the 1930s also in Slovak, was run between the wars by Jacob Klein and sent many graduates to the local gymnasium. In 1922 a few families left to pray separately and formed an Orthodox congregation under Philip Braun, attached first to the Huncovce rabbinate and later to Spišské Podhradie; the two congregations shared the cemetery and the school. Zionist, WIZO and youth movement activity was strong, and the congregation's officers included Vojtech Berger after the First World War and Dr. Artur Höfflich in 1942.

Distruzione

From 1939 local members of the German minority repeatedly attacked Jewish homes and shops in Levoča, but no damage to the synagogue in those years is recorded. After the deportations of 1942 only a small remnant of the community was left. On 2 September 1944 Nazi German forces took Levoča and installed a security police unit, which, helped by local Germans, hunted down Jews and partisans. Pinkas Hakehillot Slovakia, published by Yad Vashem in 2003, states that the Nazis then destroyed the synagogue, the adjoining mikveh and the school building and desecrated the Jewish cemetery; the town was liberated on 27 January 1945. The building was not removed at that time. The heritage gazetteer Pamiatky na Slovensku, citing Maroš Borský's Synagogue Architecture in Slovakia (2007), states: "Zbúrali ju v 70. rokoch 20. storočia" (it was demolished in the 1970s), when Czechoslovakia was under Communist rule. Neither source says who ordered or carried out that demolition, and who demolished the remains is not recorded.

Il destino della comunità

In November 1938, 55 Levoča Jews without citizenship were expelled to the no-man's land on the Hungarian border near Plešivec. From 1939 the authorities of the Slovak State closed Jewish businesses and handed large ones to Aryanisers, while local Nazi-aligned Germans looted Jewish homes and shops. Deportations began on 21 March 1942, when about 40 young women of Levoča were sent through Poprad to Auschwitz. On 24 May 1942, 522 Jews from the town and district were rounded up in the synagogue and the gymnasium and deported on 29 May from Spišská Nová Ves to the Lublin area; hospital patients followed to Auschwitz that autumn. About 80 percent of the district's Jews were deported in 1942. After the Nazi occupation of September 1944, 269 people were seized and most of the Jews among them killed on the spot; Rabbi Julius Klein and his wife were murdered. Some families were hidden in Olšavica by the priest Michal Mašlej, later recognised as Righteous Among the Nations. Survivors renewed community life after 1945, but most emigrated to Israel in 1949; about 60 Jews remained in the 1960s.

Il luogo oggi

The exact site of the synagogue has not been identified in the sources read; they say only that it stood outside the medieval town wall, which still encloses Levoča's historic centre. Nothing of the building, the school or the mikveh is known to survive after the demolition of the 1970s, and no modern photograph of the site was found. The Jewish cemetery, about two kilometres from the centre along the old road south-east of the historic town, survives; most of its gravestones were destroyed during the war, and it was cleared and tidied in 2016. A memorial to the Holocaust victims of Levoča exists in the town. The map pin for this entry marks the town centre and does not mark the synagogue.

Nomi importanti