Mándok Synagogue

Społeczność żydowska

The earliest record of Jews in Mándok is from 1770, when seven were counted; the Kisvárda memorial book likewise says the census of the 1770s mentions several. The ESJF survey gives 51 Jews in 1840, about 358 around 1880 and 400 in 1930; Gazda gives 51 in 1851, 381 in 1910 and 364 in 1941; the memorial book gives 358 in 1890 and 401 in 1939. The cemetery was in use by 1849, the date of its oldest surviving stone. According to the memorial book an independent Orthodox congregation was established in 1867, with many of the smaller communities of the Tisza district affiliated to it, and at times it was itself attached to Kisvárda. The ESJF survey says that after the schism that followed the Jewish Congress of 1868 the community joined the Orthodox stream. A county history of 1898 lists Mándok among the seventeen organised Jewish communities of Szabolcs. The memorial book names Kisvarsány, Gemzse, Tiszabezdéd and Záhony among the villages that belonged to it, and says that several members who served as junior officers in the First World War were decorated. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 has no entry for Mándok.

Architektura i projekt

Nothing is known of the building's appearance. No photograph, postcard, plan or written description of the Mándok synagogue was found: the online collection of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives returned nothing for the town, and web searches for postcards and local-history pages produced no view of it. What the sources give is dates and setting. Gazda's gazetteer, marking the information as taken from Pinkas Hakehillot, enters '1820, 1861' and the street name Petőfi utca, and classes the building as a synagogue. The ESJF survey says the synagogue was built in 1861. The two dates may mean that an earlier synagogue or prayer room of 1820 was replaced or rebuilt in 1861, but no source read says so. The ESJF survey adds that the mikveh, the school and the rabbi's house were all built around the synagogue, so it stood within a small communal compound. The architect, builder, materials, seating capacity and interior arrangement are unknown. The wooden Greek Catholic church of Mándok, now in the open-air museum at Szentendre, is a different building and has no connection with the synagogue.

Życie w synagodze

The congregation was Orthodox. The Kisvárda memorial book says its religious life was directed by a rabbi, assisted by a ritual slaughterer, a teacher and a melamed, and it lists what the community maintained: the synagogue, a Chevra Kadisha burial society, an elementary school, a cheder, a Talmud study group, a library, a mikveh, a kosher slaughterhouse and a matzah bakery. The ESJF survey places the mikveh, the school and the rabbi's house around the synagogue, so prayer, schooling and ritual bathing happened on one site. Jews from the smaller attached villages, among them Kisvarsány, which had been affiliated with Mándok since 1855, depended on the Mándok congregation. The last rabbi was Avraham Mayer. The memorial book also records that in 1938 irregular volunteer troops (szabadcsapat) raised by the Hungarian government for the occupation of Slovakia began by terrorising the Jews, after which many left, and that in 1941 the Jewish men were called up for forced labour service, many of them sent to Ukraine. No account of services, customs, seating or furnishings inside the building was found.

Zniszczenie

The synagogue lost its congregation in April 1944. The Kisvárda memorial book says that after Passover the Jews of Mándok were put on wagons and taken to the Kisvárda ghetto with only a few belongings, and that what they left behind was looted by the town's inhabitants; it does not say whether the synagogue was among the places plundered. The ESJF survey states that it was the Hungarian authorities who took them to the ghetto. No source read records damage to the building during the fighting of 1944. The only date for its end is the ESJF survey's sentence that the synagogue was destroyed in 1963, which falls under Communist rule in Hungary. The survey names no demolisher and gives no reason, and it does not say whether the building had first been sold or what it was used for after the war. Anikó Gazda, who surveyed synagogue sites between 1980 and 1987, entered the Mándok synagogue as demolished. A local guesthouse blog wrote in 2011 that there had once been a synagogue in the village and that its site could no longer be found.

Los społeczności

Gazda counts 364 Jews in Mándok in 1941; the Kisvárda memorial book gives 401 for 1939. From 1941 the men were conscripted into forced labour service, many being sent to Ukraine. After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Jews from the villages around Kisvárda were moved into the Kisvárda ghetto from 8 April, and the town's own Jews followed from 15 April; close to 7,000 people were held there in severe overcrowding. The Hungarian authorities took the Jews of Mándok there after Passover, and the Jews of Kisvarsány were brought first to Mándok and then on to Kisvárda. On 29 and 31 May 1944 the ghetto was emptied in two transports to the Nazi German camp at Auschwitz. Rabbi Avraham Mayer travelled in the same boxcar as his congregation and was killed with them. Eighteen men returned from forced labour and twenty women from Auschwitz; most of them soon left the village. The latest gravestone in the Jewish cemetery dates from 1957. No source read records an organised community after that.

Miejsce dzisiaj

The exact plot has not been identified. Gazda's gazetteer, following Pinkas Hakehillot, places the synagogue on Petőfi utca, a street near the centre of Mándok, but gives no house number, and a local blog wrote in 2011 that the synagogue's site can no longer be found. What stands on the plot today is therefore unknown, and no surviving fragment or marker is recorded in the sources read. The map pin for this entry marks the midpoint of Petőfi utca and should be read as the street, not the plot. The Jewish cemetery survives about 600 metres to the north-west, reached by a path from 34 Mester utca; the ESJF survey found it fenced, with 129 gravestones dating from 1849 to 1957.

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