Telegdy utca Synagogue, Miskolc

PANORAMICA

La storia di Telegdy utca Synagogue, Miskolc

Miskolc, the chief town of Borsod county in north-eastern Hungary, had one of the largest Jewish communities in provincial Hungary, and over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it supported several houses of prayer. The best known are the synagogue on Kazinczy utca, built between 1856 and 1863 and still in use, and the synagogue on Palóczy utca, completed in 1901 and blown up in 1963. Besides these, the community kept smaller prayer rooms, among them one in the two-storey communal buildings at the meeting of the Pece and Szinva streams, and a Hasidic group had a small place of worship on Kölcsey utca. Anikó Gazda's gazetteer of Hungarian synagogues, compiled from a site survey made between 1980 and 1987, lists six buildings for Miskolc and, as the sixth, a synagogue on Telegdy utca, which she marks as demolished; she gives no building date. She also notes six prayer rooms elsewhere in the town. No other source consulted for this entry mentions a synagogue on that street, so its size, its date, the congregation that used it and the circumstances of its loss are all unknown. The street name itself may preserve the memory of the Telegdy (Telegdy Kun) family, whose name was attached to the Jewish ritual bath on Király utca, but no source links the bath and the synagogue, and the street does not exist under that name on present-day maps.

POSIZIONE

Where it stood

Historic: Telegdy utca, Miskolc, Borsod county; house number unknown. Today: street not found under that name; placeholder pin at the centre of Miskolc, Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county (approximate).

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La comunità ebraica

Jews were living in Miskolc by the eighteenth century. A prayer hall stood on Kádas utca in 1764, the community bought the plot with its buildings in 1787, and a new synagogue of solid materials appears in the land register of 1793; Falk Ehrmann pledged money for its stonework in 1797. In the 1830s a small synagogue and a school also stood at the Pálinkapiac at the end of Fő utca. Abraham Posselburg (Wiener) served as rabbi for 32 years until his death in 1832. The community grew rapidly in the nineteenth century: Gazda's survey of 1980-87 records 10,291 Jews in Miskolc in 1910 and 10,428 in 1941, and a local-history article puts it at about 10,000 people, roughly 16.5 per cent of the town's population, between the wars. It was divided between an Orthodox majority and Neolog members: the Kazinczy utca temple had been built for Neolog worship, while the Palóczy utca synagogue, with its central reading platform, was Orthodox and was preferred by chief rabbi Austerlitz. The community also ran schools, a ritual bath, kosher butchery and other institutions. Which part of this community used the Telegdy utca building is unknown.

Architettura e design

Nothing is known of the architecture of the Telegdy utca synagogue. No photograph, plan, drawing or description of it was found in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives (MILEV), on the JewishGen KehilaLinks pages for Miskolc, or in the local-history articles consulted. The MILEV postcards catalogued under Miskolc all show either the Palóczy utca synagogue, a large domed building facing a small park, or the interior of the Kazinczy utca synagogue, and none of them is captioned with Telegdy utca. Gazda's classification of the building as a synagogue rather than a prayer room suggests a free-standing house of worship, but she rates her own data as 80 to 90 per cent accurate and the classification is not confirmed by any other source. Its builder, style, materials, seating capacity and interior arrangement are therefore unknown, as is whether it was purpose-built or converted from another building.

La vita nella sinagoga

No record of services, rabbis, cantors, officers or societies attached to a synagogue on Telegdy utca was found. In the early twentieth century Miskolc had two large synagogues, the Neolog temple on Kazinczy utca and the Orthodox synagogue on Palóczy utca, and Gazda counts six further prayer rooms in the town besides the buildings she lists. The community's institutions included a communal complex near the meeting of the Pece and Szinva streams, which held an apprentice school, a prayer house, a kosher butcher's cutting room, a ritual slaughterer and a cheder, and the ritual bath run by Sámuel Telegdy Kun on Király utca, which was used under strict ritual rules and enlarged as the community grew. Whether the Telegdy utca synagogue was linked to any of these, which rite it followed and who worshipped there are not recorded in the sources read, and nothing about the life of its congregation is documented.

Distruzione

Only Gazda's survey records the end of the Telegdy utca synagogue. Gazda found it demolished when she surveyed Hungarian synagogue sites between 1980 and 1987, but she gives no date and names nobody. The building may have suffered in the Second World War, when Miskolc was bombed and the Kazinczy utca synagogue was badly damaged and the dome of the Jewish bath on Király utca was destroyed, or it may have been cleared in the post-war decades, when the Communist city leadership blew up the Palóczy utca synagogue in 1963 and the bath was pulled down in the late 1970s for a housing estate. None of this is documented for the Telegdy utca building itself, and who demolished it, and when, is not recorded in any source found.

Il destino della comunità

The Jews of Miskolc shared the fate of provincial Hungarian Jewry after the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, but the details of the Miskolc ghetto and the deportations, including dates and numbers, were not read in sources consulted for this entry and are left unstated here. The local-history article consulted states that the greater part of the town's Jewish community, which had numbered about 10,000 people before the war, was lost in the Holocaust. After the war survivors and returnees reconstituted a single community, which renovated the damaged Kazinczy utca synagogue and kept it as its house of worship, while the larger Palóczy utca building, used as a warehouse, was given up and later blown up. A Jewish community still exists in Miskolc, worships in the Kazinczy utca synagogue and holds memorials in the Jewish cemetery on Avas hill. Nothing is known of the particular congregation that used the Telegdy utca synagogue or of its members' fate.

Il luogo oggi

The site of the Telegdy utca synagogue has not been identified. No street named Telegdy utca appears in present-day Miskolc on OpenStreetMap, so the street has presumably been renamed or built over, and no source found gives the old and new names or a house number. The map pin for this entry is therefore a placeholder at the centre of Miskolc and should not be read as the synagogue's location. No surviving fragment or marker is recorded. Gazda gives the street but no house number. Fixing the site will need old Miskolc street directories or cadastral maps, or the collections of the Herman Ottó Museum and the Miskolc city archives.

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