Mattersdorf Synagogue (Mattersburg)

הקהילה היהודית

Jews are documented in Mattersdorf from 1526 and the community re-formed in 1527 after an expulsion; one tradition, repeated in community lore, traces families such as the Schischa to the fourteenth century. It grew under the Esterházy princes as one of the Seven Communities of the Burgenland. Figures collected by Veronika Schmid show 60 Jews in 1569, 273 in 1669, 767 in 1785 and a peak of 1,517 in 1813, after which numbers fell to 1,257 in 1850, about 700 in 1883, 577 in 1923 and 511 in 1934. A cholera epidemic in 1830-1832 reduced the community. It was strictly Orthodox, governed by a council headed by a Rosh ha-Kahal, and was known across Hungary for its yeshiva, founded in 1778 by Rabbi Jeremiah ben Isaac and later led by Moses Sofer. From the 1830s a line of the Sofer and Ehrenfeld rabbinical families served the town; the last rabbi, Samuel Ehrenfeld, served until 1938.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

No construction plans survive, and Schmid's reconstruction rests on photographs, cadastral maps and descriptions. The building was probably Gothic in origin and much altered. It had a barrel-like trough vault (Muldengewölbe) supported outside by buttresses, a steep hipped roof whose ridge over the prayer hall was about 130 cm higher than the rest, and a plain whitewashed street façade articulated by pilasters; the windows began about 1.6 m above the floor. A photograph shows the façade with its round-headed doorway, a lantern bracket and the plaque, beside the outside stair of the Abeles house. Inside, the bimah was a raised stone platform with stone corner posts joined by a wrought-iron grille and a wooden reading desk. The Torah ark on the east wall had wooden half-columns and a carved horseshoe arch in Moorish style. A women's gallery rested on two cast-iron columns behind a wooden grille. A brass chandelier with 25 glass globes was hung in 1932, and a starry ceiling and ornamental bands were painted afterwards, replacing older paintings covered around 1910. The architect, builder and seating capacity are unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

Men and women entered by separate doors. The entrance hall held a cupboard for the shammes and the large chair used by the mohel at circumcisions. The synagogue's treasury kept goblets, Torah shields and crowns from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and Torah ark curtains described as dating from as early as the thirteenth or fourteenth century, which were shown in use on photographs taken before 1924. Religious life was shaped by the rabbis and the yeshiva behind the synagogue. Jeremiah ben Isaac, rabbi from 1770, founded the yeshiva in 1778. Moses Sofer came from Strassnitz in 1798 and taught here until he was called to Pressburg in 1806. Simon Sofer served from 1842 or 1843 until he left for Kraków in 1857. Samuel Ehrenfeld, the first of his family here, served until his death in 1883 and was followed by his son Simcha Bunem Ehrenfeld, who died in 1926, and by Samuel Ehrenfeld. A New Year greeting postcard showing the interior was printed before 1924, and a photograph of 1937 shows a Purim celebration.

הרס

The Anschluss of March 1938 ended the synagogue's use. Before the end of September 1938 the Nazi mayor, Franz Giefing, had a white flag raised on the synagogue and declared Mattersburg 'judenfrei'. The Torah scrolls were reportedly taken to the Schiffschul in Vienna, which was burned in the November Pogrom. The empty building was plundered; a memorial stone in the town wrongly dates its destruction to Kristallnacht. According to Veronika Schmid's study, the Wehrmacht had inspected the former ghetto in early 1939, and in September 1940 an engineer platoon (Pionierzug) of about thirty soldiers pulled down the decaying houses of the Judengasse by hand and with explosives. On the same day the synagogue was blown up: holes were drilled into the masonry for dynamite charges, and Hitler Youth and younger Pimpfe were first led through the building and told they would see 'all this Jewish junk' vanish at the push of a button. Photographs show soldiers with charges, Wehrmacht men, gendarmes and onlookers after the blast, and the ruins. Who ordered the demolition is not recorded in the sources read; the exact day in September is unknown.

גורל הקהילה

On 13 March 1938, the day after the Nazi German invasion, Mayor Michael Koch told the Jews to leave, and looting and violence broke out in the Judengasse that day. In the summer of 1938 the Jews of the community were stripped of their citizenship, and under the Burgenland Nazi leader Tobias Portschy the province was made the first district of the German Reich to be emptied of Jews; by the end of September 1938 none remained in Mattersburg, and the census of 1939 counted none. Most fled to Vienna and tried to emigrate from there. Rabbi Samuel Ehrenfeld and part of his congregation reached New York, where they kept together as a community. Those who could not leave Austria were later deported to the death camps. Family records gathered by descendants name many Mattersdorf Jews murdered in Auschwitz, Stutthof and elsewhere, among them children such as Renée Deutsch, killed in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of eleven. The Nazis also destroyed the Jewish cemetery. In 1958 Ehrenfeld's followers founded Kiryat Mattersdorf in Jerusalem, which carries the town's name.

האתר כיום

None of the Jewish houses of the Judengasse survives on its old plot apart from a few former Jewish-owned business buildings. The synagogue site was rebuilt after the war; in 1969 a fifteen-storey block, the first high-rise in the Burgenland, went up behind the former synagogue and Talmud school. The street has been rebuilt with post-war houses and shops, one of them now a café. A memorial stone on Brunnenplatz recalls the synagogue. In 2014 the path along the Wulka stream was named Samuel-Ehrenfeld-Weg, and the association 'Wir Erinnern' was founded in 2013. The old Jewish cemetery, wrecked under Nazi rule, survives with a monument built from broken gravestones.

שמות בולטים