The story of Malín Synagogue
Malín lies close to Kutná Hora, the old silver-mining town of Central Bohemia, and is today part of it. For centuries Jews were not allowed to settle in Kutná Hora itself, and the nearby market town of Malín was one of the places where they lived instead. According to Jüdische Gemeinden, Malín had a sizeable Jewish community in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The synagogue was built between 1859 and 1863, the dates given in Jiří Fiedler's inventory of Jewish monuments in Bohemia and Moravia. This was a late moment for a new building: the residence restrictions of the old regime had been lifted in 1848, and Malín families were already moving into Kutná Hora, which built its own synagogue in 1881 and formed an official community in 1893. The Malín building therefore served a congregation that was probably already shrinking when it opened.
No photograph, plan or description of the synagogue was found. Fiedler records only that it was demolished after 1970, which means that it survived the war and the first decades of Communist rule before disappearing. Its exact site in Malín is unknown, and so are its architect, size and appearance. The building deserves further research in local archives and in the photographic collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague.
Where it stood for 107 years
Historic: Malín (Malin), market town near Kutná Hora, Bohemia; street and house number unknown. Today: Malín, district of Kutná Hora, okres Kutná Hora, Středočeský kraj; placeholder pin at the centre of Malín (approximate).
Open larger map →The Jewish community
Jewish families could not settle permanently in Kutná Hora (German: Kuttenberg) for centuries and came to the mining town only briefly to trade. Malín, a small market town close by, was one of the places where they could live. Jüdische Gemeinden describes it as having a quite considerable Israelite community in the first half of the nineteenth century. When the restrictions were abolished in 1848, a number of these families moved into Kutná Hora. The Kutná Hora congregation was officially founded only in 1893, with about 170 members, and grew further as Jewish families from the surrounding countryside joined it; by 1920-1921 it counted more than 300 people, about two thirds of them living in the town itself. The Jews of the district buried their dead in the old cemetery at Malešov, south-west of Kutná Hora, which dates from before 1758. How many Jews lived in Malín at any date, when the Malín congregation ceased to function separately, and who its rabbis, teachers and leaders were are all unknown.
Architecture and design
No photograph, drawing, plan or written description of the Malín synagogue was found during this research, so its appearance is unknown. The only fixed facts are its building dates, 1859 to 1863, which Fiedler gives. A four-year construction period suggests a purpose-built, free-standing structure rather than a converted room, but this is an inference, not a documented fact. Fiedler, who lists surviving and lost buildings throughout the region, records nothing about its form, and no image of it has been traced in the sources consulted, so even basic features such as the number of storeys, the roof form, the window pattern or the presence of a women's gallery cannot be stated. The architect, builder, seating capacity, materials and interior arrangement are all unknown. Local building records, the stable cadastre map of Malín and the survey files of the Jewish Museum in Prague are the most likely places to find a plan or photograph.
Life inside the synagogue
Nothing specific is recorded in the sources found about worship in the Malín synagogue: its rite, its rabbis or cantors, its school, its societies or its ritual objects are all unknown. What can be said is that the building was put up at the end of the period when Malín was the main Jewish settlement near Kutná Hora. From 1848 Jews were free to live in Kutná Hora, and families from Malín moved there. Kutná Hora had its own synagogue from 1881 and a new one from 1902, and its community was formally constituted in 1893, drawing in Jewish families from the rural surroundings. It is likely that the Malín synagogue was used less and less from the late nineteenth century onwards, and that the remaining Malín Jews came to belong to the Kutná Hora congregation, but no source read states when regular services in Malín ended. The community's dead were buried at Malešov.
Destruction
No source found records any damage to the Malín synagogue during the Second World War or its use during the Nazi German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. Jiří Fiedler's town-by-town inventory of Jewish monuments in Bohemia and Moravia records simply that the synagogue was demolished after 1970. This shows that the building was still standing a quarter of a century after the war, in the period of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, and was then removed. Fiedler gives no exact year, does not say why the building was pulled down, and does not name the body or person who ordered or carried out the demolition. It is not known whether the building had been sold by the Jewish community after 1945, whether it had been put to another use in the meantime, or whether it was cleared as part of building work in Malín. Who demolished it is not recorded in the sources consulted.
The community’s fate
The Jewish community of Malín had largely dissolved into that of Kutná Hora long before the Second World War. Under the Nazi German occupation, Jüdische Gemeinden records that the Jewish families of Kutná Hora and its surroundings were deported in the early summer of 1942; the source does not give the destination or the number of people. Fiedler mentions, among natives of Kutná Hora, the theatre designer František Zelenka, who perished in 1944 in a transport from the Terezín ghetto. How many people with roots in Malín were deported, and how many survived, is unknown. No Jewish community re-formed in Malín after the war. The Malešov cemetery, where the Jews of the area were buried, survives; it is protected, has between one hundred and five hundred gravestones, and is owned by the Jewish Community of Prague.
The site today
The location of the synagogue within Malín has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what stands on its plot today. Malín is now a district of the town of Kutná Hora, and the map pin for this entry marks the centre of the Malín administrative area as recorded in OpenStreetMap, not the synagogue itself. No surviving fragment of the building is recorded. No marker on the site was found. The nearest surviving Jewish monuments are the old cemetery at Malešov and the former 1902 synagogue in Kutná Hora, which is now used by the Czechoslovak Hussite Church. Identifying the plot will require the stable cadastre maps of the nineteenth century or the municipal building records of Kutná Hora.
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