La storia di Shoemakers' Synagogue of Mikulov
Mikulov, the German Nikolsburg, on the Austrian border in South Moravia, was for three centuries the seat of the Moravian chief rabbis and, until the mid-nineteenth century, the second-largest Jewish community in the Czech lands after Prague. A community of that size needed many places of worship: at its height the town had twelve synagogues and prayer houses. Beside the great Upper Synagogue (Altschul) stood smaller congregations, several of them named after the groups that used them, such as the Butchers' Synagogue and the Shoemakers' Synagogue, known in German as the Schusterschul and in Czech as the Ševcovská synagoga.
The Shoemakers' Synagogue stood in the courtyard behind house no. 27 on Brněnská Street, on the plot now occupied by house no. 1618. The record compiled for the Zničené kostely inventory by Josef Šuba of the Regional Museum in Mikulov classes it as a vanished brick synagogue, gives its construction as about 1750 and dates its demolition to the beginning of the 1980s, attributing its loss to lack of maintenance. Like most of Mikulov's minor synagogues it went out of use as the community shrank during the nineteenth century; when exactly its services ended is unknown. No photograph, plan or description of the building has been found, so its size, appearance and interior are unknown, and nothing is recorded about the shoemakers' association or members who maintained it.
Where it stood
Historic: courtyard of house no. 27, Brněnská Street (Brünner Gasse), Mikulov. Today: plot of house no. 1618, Brněnská Street, 692 01 Mikulov (site approximate, from published coordinates).
Apri la mappa grande →La comunità ebraica
Jewish settlement in Mikulov is documented from the second half of the fourteenth century, and the community probably formed in the fifteenth, under the protection first of the Liechtenstein and later of the Dietrichstein lords. In 1657 the town had 146 Jewish families, and in 1670 another 80 families expelled from Vienna were admitted. From the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century Mikulov was allowed 620 licensed Jewish families: 3,238 people in 1793 and 3,670 in 1848, 39 per cent of the town. Its Jews traded above all with the markets of Lower and Upper Austria and dealt in wool and small wares, while the number of Jewish craftsmen was limited by the authorities, which gives some context for a separate congregation of shoemakers. From the sixteenth century until 1851 Mikulov was the seat of the Moravian chief rabbis, among them Judah Loew ben Bezalel and Samson Raphael Hirsch, and its yeshiva had a European reputation. After emancipation families moved away, mostly to Vienna: about 1,500 Jews lived there in 1869, 900 in 1900 and 437 in 1930.
Architettura e design
Almost nothing is known about the building's architecture. The inventory record calls it a brick synagogue and places it in the courtyard of the house at Brněnská 27, which means it stood behind the street front rather than on it, as did other small Mikulov synagogues such as the Michelstädter Synagogue in the courtyard of Husova 52 and the Ashkenazi Synagogue in the courtyard of the houses on Alfonse Muchy Street. Its construction date of about 1750 places it in the decades after the great fire of 1719, when the Jewish quarter was rebuilt in brick and the Upper Synagogue received its Baroque form. Whether it was a free-standing courtyard building or a hall attached to the rear of the house is not stated, and no plan, photograph or measured drawing has been found. Its size, the number of seats, the position of the ark and bimah, any women's gallery, its roof form and its decoration are all unknown, as are the names of its builder and of the patrons who paid for it.
La vita nella sinagoga
No account of worship in the Shoemakers' Synagogue has been found. Its name follows a pattern found in large Central European Jewish communities, where small synagogues were often maintained by a trade association or confraternity whose members prayed and studied together, and Mikulov had a parallel Butchers' Synagogue (Fleischacker-Kazowimschul). It is therefore likely that the synagogue served the Jewish shoemakers of the town and their families, but the records read do not describe its congregation, its officers, its prayer rite or whether it also served as a study house. In the mid-nineteenth century Mikulov had three synagogues in regular use and about ten prayer rooms; as the Jewish population fell from more than 3,600 to under a thousand, most of these small houses of prayer were closed, until only the Upper Synagogue and the New Synagogue were still used. When the Shoemakers' Synagogue held its last services is unknown.
Distruzione
The building outlasted its congregation by many decades. The inventory record compiled by Josef Šuba of the Regional Museum in Mikulov places its period of devastation between 1945 and 1989, gives lack of maintenance as the cause and dates its final demolition to the beginning of the 1980s, in the Communist period. By then most of Mikulov's Jewish quarter had already gone: Fiedler notes that it was damaged in the fighting of 1945 and that a large part of its buildings was demolished afterwards, and Jüdische Gemeinden says the old Jewish town was largely levelled at the end of the 1960s, when only about 90 of some 320 houses survived. Fiedler records that several small synagogues, the rabbi's house and other community buildings were pulled down, mostly between 1950 and 1975; the Shoemakers' Synagogue was one of the last to go. Who ordered or carried out the demolition, and whether the building was then owned by the state, the town or a private owner, is not recorded in the sources read.
Il destino della comunità
In 1930 Mikulov had 437 Jewish residents. When the town was occupied by Nazi German forces on 8 October 1938, the town's own Nazis hurried to make it 'free of Jews'; most Jews fled or were driven out at once, and only a few poor, elderly and sick people remained. Those still in Mikulov after 1938 were deported in 1941 and 1942, and most of them were murdered in the extermination camps. The collections of the Moravian Jewish Museum, founded in Mikulov in 1936, were moved to Brno in 1939 and later to the Jewish Museum in Prague. After the war a few dozen survivors returned, but the authorities refused to give back their property, and a Jewish community was revived only briefly. In 1948 Mikulov served as the assembly point for the Czechoslovak volunteer brigade, about 1,280 soldiers and some 700 family members, who left from there for Israel. No congregation has existed in the town since.
Il luogo oggi
The synagogue's site lies on Brněnská Street, on the plot of the present house no. 1618; the inventory record notes that the land on which the synagogue stood is privately owned. No part of the building is recorded as surviving and no marker is reported on the site. The pin for this entry uses the coordinates published in the Zničené kostely inventory for the synagogue's location. Of the Jewish quarter's many synagogues only the Upper Synagogue on Husova Street, restored between 1977 and 1989 and now used by the Regional Museum for exhibitions and concerts, survives intact, together with the shell of the Michelstädter Synagogue and the ruin of the Ashkenazi Synagogue. The large Jewish cemetery, with about 4,000 gravestones, lies on the slope of the Kozí hrádek hill on the northern edge of the former ghetto.
Hai qualcosa da condividere?
Fotografie, documenti, storie di famiglia o ricordi di questa sinagoga e della sua comunità aiutano a mantenerne viva la storia.
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