Kölcsey Street Hasidic Synagogue, Miskolc

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История Kölcsey Street Hasidic Synagogue, Miskolc

Miskolc, the chief town of Borsod county in north-eastern Hungary, had one of the largest Jewish communities in provincial Hungary, with more than 10,000 Jews in 1910 and again in 1941. Its great synagogue on Kazinczy utca, begun in 1861, still stands. Besides it, the city had smaller congregations and prayer houses. One of them was a small Hasidic place of worship on Kölcsey utca. According to the English Wikipedia article on the Miskolc Synagogue, the local Hasidim built it after the community divided over the reforms of the 1860s, and it no longer survives. Anikó Gazda's gazetteer of Hungarian synagogues, based on a site survey made between 1980 and 1987, lists the Kölcsey utca building as a synagogue and records it as demolished, without giving a construction date. No photograph, plan or description of the building has been found, and the sources read give neither the year it was built nor the year it was pulled down. This entry therefore records the existence and loss of the building and the history of the community it served, and marks the many open questions as unknown.

МЕСТО

Where it stood

Historic: Kölcsey utca, Miskolc, Borsod county; house number unknown. Today: Kölcsey Ferenc utca, 3524 Miskolc, Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county (approximate: street only).

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Еврейская община

Jews were allowed to settle in Miskolc in the eighteenth century. A cemetery is recorded from 1759 and a prayer house from 1765, and in the 1790s the community built a solid synagogue on Kádas utca. The Jewish population grew from 1,096 in 1840 to 3,412 in 1857, 4,117 in 1880 and 10,029 in 1910; it was 10,428 in 1941. The building of the new temple on Kazinczy utca from 1861 split the community: its design placed an organ above the Ark, thirty Orthodox rabbis meeting at Sátoraljaújhely pronounced a ban on the Miskolc congregation, and in 1870 it joined the Neolog side, before an Orthodox community was formed in 1875. A separate Sephardic congregation was also founded, led at first by a cloth-dyer named Strauss, with Mózes Vitriol and then József Reinitz of Mád as its rabbis. The Hasidim kept their own elementary school. Whether the Kölcsey utca prayer house belonged to the Sephardic congregation or to a separate Hasidic circle is not stated in the sources read.

Архитектура и дизайн

Nothing is known of the building's architecture. The only description found calls it a small place of worship, which suggests a modest prayer house rather than a monumental synagogue, perhaps a room or a single-storey hall within a courtyard, as was common for Hasidic congregations in Hungarian towns; this is an inference, not a documented fact. The architect, the builder, the date of construction, the materials, the seating capacity and the arrangement of the interior are all unknown. No photograph, postcard, plan or drawing of the Kölcsey utca building has been found. The many postcards of Miskolc synagogues held by the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives and reproduced on the JewishGen KehilaLinks site show the great synagogue, and none can be identified as this building. The exact plot on Kölcsey utca has also not been identified, so its relation to the neighbouring streets and to the Kazinczy utca synagogue is unknown.

Жизнь в синагоге

No record of services, rabbis or officers specific to the Kölcsey utca prayer house has been found. The Miskolc memorial book on JewishGen describes the wider religious life of the city: the main congregation's rabbis included Mózes Fischmann, elected in 1836 and serving until his death in 1875, Dr. Salomon Spira, elected in 1898, and Samuel Austerlitz, elected in 1914, while the Sephardic congregation had its own rabbis and its own butcher. The Hasidim of Miskolc ran a separate elementary school, which shows that they formed a distinct group within the Orthodox community with their own institutions. A small Hasidic prayer house of this kind would usually have served for daily and Sabbath prayer, study and the gatherings around a rebbe or his followers, but how the Kölcsey utca congregation was organised, which Hasidic dynasty its members followed and how many attended are unknown.

Разрушение

The sources read do not say when or how the Kölcsey utca prayer house was destroyed. No record was found of damage to it during the Second World War, of its use after 1945, of a sale by the surviving community, or of a demolition order. The English Wikipedia article on the Miskolc Synagogue says only that the building no longer survives. Anikó Gazda's survey of Hungarian synagogue sites, carried out between 1980 and 1987, records it as demolished, which means it had disappeared by then at the latest. The building may have stood empty after the deportations of June 1944, but no source says so. Who demolished it, and in what year, is not recorded in any source found.

Судьба общины

After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944, the Jews of Miskolc were made to wear the yellow star and were confined within weeks. According to Helene Kenvin's account on JewishGen KehilaLinks, some were held at a stone quarry on the edge of the city and many others in a large former brick-factory shed beside the railway, guarded by Hungarian and Nazi German police and soldiers. Five transports left Miskolc and Diósgyőr between about 11 and 15 June 1944, carrying 15,451 people according to the train counts, including Jews from surrounding places, and reached Auschwitz between 13 and 16 June after passing through Kassa. A memorial plaque attributes the deportations to the 'fascist authority'. Earlier, in 1941, about 500 Miskolc Jews had been expelled to German-occupied Poland and murdered at Kamenets-Podolsk. The number of survivors is uncertain: the Jewish Virtual Library gives 400, while Kenvin cites 105. In 1946 the community counted 2,353 members, many of them survivors from elsewhere in transit. By the 1970s only a few hundred Jews remained.

Место сегодня

The exact plot of the prayer house on Kölcsey utca has not been identified, so it is not possible to say what stands on the site today. OpenStreetMap places Kölcsey Ferenc utca in the Avas district of the city. No surviving fragment of the building and no marker on its site are recorded in the sources read. The Kazinczy utca synagogue, the great synagogue of Miskolc, survives nearby. The map pin for this entry marks the street as returned by OpenStreetMap, not the building itself. Locating the plot will need old cadastral maps, address directories or the local-history collections of the Herman Ottó Museum in Miskolc.

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