Orthodox Synagogue of Lučenec

The Jewish community

The Orthodox Jews of Lucenec were a minority within a large and prosperous Jewish population that dominated the town's commerce and had several members on the city council. Dissenters from the Neolog reforms prayed separately from 1867-69, and the Pinkas Hakehillot says their separate community was recognised by the authorities in 1880 and opened its own elementary school in 1875. Its early rabbis included Yakov Koppel Zinger, who moved to Trenčín in 1883, Tuvia Rosenthal, author of Shoshan Emek, and Moshe Asher Eckshtein. In the 1920s there were about 70 Orthodox heads of family, some 250 people; membership grew to 351 by 1929, and Juričková gives about 375 members in 1933. The community was led first by Dr. Ľudovít Rosenberg and then by Samuel (Shmuel) Klein, and its rabbi was Hillel Unsdorfer, a leader of the Mizrachi movement in Slovakia. It kept a Bet Midrash, a Talmud Torah and a Beis Yakov school for girls, and shared the cemetery and the Jewish elementary school with the Neolog community. Members also founded a branch of Agudat Yisroel.

Architecture and design

Very little is known about the building's appearance. Juričková, drawing on the community's records, says that the Orthodox community built a synagogue in 1930 with a ground plan of 24 by 13 metres, and that it contained an entrance hall, the main prayer hall, a winter prayer room above the entrance, a meeting room and a room for the rabbi. The Pinkas Hakehillot gives the same dimensions, 13 by 24 metres, and the year 1930. A building of that size would have been considerably smaller than the Neolog synagogue of 1925, which seated more than a thousand people. No photograph, drawing or plan of the Orthodox synagogue was found, and neither source names its architect or builder or describes its style, materials or seating. The style, capacity and architect remain unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

The synagogue served a congregation that combined strict observance with active Zionism. Its rabbi, Hillel Unsdorfer, was one of the Mizrachi leaders in Slovakia, and the community's young people belonged to Bnei Akiva, while other members supported Agudat Yisroel. On the eve of the Second World War the community had 59 families and four employees and owned the synagogue, a Beis Midrash, a community house and an old-age home; its head was Adolph Bak. Under Hungarian rule from November 1938 the Jews of the town lost their rights step by step, and from March 1944 their organisations were closed. After the war the synagogue came back into use: the Pinkas Hakehillot records that public prayer was resumed first in the Orthodox synagogue, before the Neolog synagogue was rededicated in May 1948, at a time when about 400 survivors had gathered in Lučenec under the communal head Samuel Rosenberg.

Destruction

No source read records damage to the Orthodox synagogue during the Second World War or the fighting for Lučenec, which the Soviet Army entered on 14 January 1945. The building was still usable after the liberation, since the surviving Jews resumed public prayer in it before any other synagogue in the town. The community shrank rapidly: about 300 Jews lived in Lučenec at the end of 1948, around half left for Israel in 1949, and 156 remained. In the 1960s the city authorities, then under Communist rule, converted the Neolog synagogue into a storeroom. The Pinkas Hakehillot states that the Orthodox synagogue was destroyed in 1969, and the en.wikipedia list of synagogues in Slovakia gives the same year. Neither source says who ordered or carried out the demolition, whether the building had first been sold or taken over by the state, or why it was pulled down. After 1969 the small remaining community held its services in an improvised prayer hall.

The community’s fate

Lučenec was annexed to Hungary on 2 November 1938, and Hungarian authorities subjected the Jews to growing persecution. Hungarian policemen murdered Voytech Cohen during an interrogation, and from 1941 many young Jewish men were taken into forced-labour battalions, most of those sent to the eastern front dying there. After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 the Hungarian authorities closed Jewish institutions, set up a Judenrat at the beginning of May and on 2 May ordered the Jews of the area into a ghetto in the poor southern district called Flour Mill Valley, where about five people lived to a room. At the end of May some 80 young men were taken from the ghetto for forced labour under the Hungarian army. From 12 June 1944 the Jews were moved to a local brick factory and deported from there in two transports to Auschwitz. Both rabbis of the town, the Orthodox rabbi Hillel Unsdorfer and the Neolog rabbi Arthur Rashovsky, were among the deported and were murdered. About 400 survivors from the town and district gathered in Lučenec after the war; a small community of about 50 members still existed when the Pinkas Hakehillot was written.

The site today

The site of the Orthodox synagogue has not been identified in any source read. Neither the Pinkas Hakehillot nor Juričková's study gives its street or plot, and no marker or surviving fragment is recorded. The map pin for this entry is therefore a placeholder at the centre of Lučenec and does not mark the building. The Neolog synagogue of 1925 on Adyho Street, which the municipality restored in 2015-16 as a cultural centre, is a separate building and still stands. The Jewish cemetery of Lučenec remains in use and in good repair. Locating the Orthodox synagogue will need the 1930 opening report in Národný týždenník, cadastral maps or the Lučenec branch of the state archive.

Notable names