Tejfalu (Mliečno) Synagogue, Šamorín

The Jewish community

The heritage register entry on the Jewish cemetery gives the fullest account of the community. It describes the Tejfalu Jews as the oldest congregation of the Mosaic faith in the Upper Csallóköz, already in existence in the 1700s, and says the village was the centre of a rabbinate, kept a Jewish school and maintained a registry district of 27 settlements. In 1828 the village had 1,021 inhabitants, of whom 422 were Jews. Fényes counted 329 Jews in about 1851 alongside 525 Catholics and 15 Calvinists, and wrote that they kept many inns, butcher's shops and stores and carried on considerable trade. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 names Dávid ha-Kohen Bisztritz, formerly rabbi of Szenice, as head of the Tejfalu congregation; he died there in 1862. The lifting of the residence ban in Šamorín in 1840 and the founding of a congregation there in the 1860s drew families away, and by 1919 only 43 of the village's 597 inhabitants were Jews. The large Jewish cemetery, said to be the biggest in the Upper Csallóköz, has had no burials since the 1920s.

Architecture and design

No description, plan or dated photograph of the synagogue's exterior or interior was found in the sources that could be read. Fényes's dictionary of 1851 confirms only that a synagogue existed in the village, and the heritage register mentions it only as the place where the faithful of the registry district worshipped, without giving its date, size or location. Whether the building that was later destroyed was the same one Fényes knew, or a later replacement, is unknown. The one known image of it is the photograph of its destruction printed on page 306 of the Hebrew section of the 1975 Dunaszerdahely memorial book, on the same page as a view of the Šamorín synagogue; that page could not be viewed in this research, so nothing can be said here about the building's form, materials or style. Its architect, builder, seating capacity and interior arrangements are all unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

Little is recorded about worship in the building. As the synagogue of a rabbinate seat, it served not only the Jews of Tejfalu but, according to the heritage register, believers from the 27 villages and hamlets of the congregation's registry district, which made it the main place of prayer for Jews scattered across the Upper Csallóköz before Šamorín had a congregation of its own. The community also kept a school and a registry, and its rabbi in the mid-nineteenth century, Dávid ha-Kohen Bisztritz, was a scholar whose commentary on the Shulchan Aruch, Bet David, was published; in 1862 he was elected rabbi of Mád but died suddenly at Tejfalu before he could take up the post. How long regular services continued in the synagogue as the community shrank after the 1860s, and whether it was still in use in the 1930s, is not known from the sources read.

Destruction

The only direct evidence for the end of the synagogue is a photograph captioned 'Destruction of the Tejfalu Synagogue' in the Hebrew section of Sefer zikaron le-kehilat Dunaszerdahely, the memorial book of the Jews of Dunajská Streda edited by Abraham Issachar Engel and published in Tel Aviv in 1975. The picture appears on page 306, at the end of the chapters on the Holocaust and its aftermath and before the chapter on the neighbouring communities of Šamorín and Magendorf. The caption, as translated in the book's published picture list, gives no date and no cause. It is therefore unknown whether the synagogue was wrecked during the Second World War, when the village belonged again to Hungary between 1938 and 1945, or demolished after the war under Czechoslovak and later Communist rule, and who demolished it is not recorded in any source found. No second written source documenting the demolition was found. The first page of the village's listings in the Hungarian heritage register for southern Slovakia include the Jewish cemetery but no synagogue.

The community’s fate

By the twentieth century most Jews of the area lived in Šamorín rather than Tejfalu, and only 43 remained in the village in 1919. In November 1938 the Csallóköz, including Tejfalu and Šamorín, was annexed to Hungary. After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Hungarian authorities set up a ghetto around the Šamorín synagogue on 16 April 1944 and gathered the local Jews there. According to the Slovak Jewish Heritage Center, after about six weeks they were taken to Dunajská Streda and from there deported to Auschwitz. Whether any Jews were still living in Tejfalu itself in 1944, and how many people from the village were murdered or survived, is unknown. A small community was re-established in Šamorín after the war but dissolved in the 1960s, and no Jews live there today. The Tejfalu Jewish cemetery survives, almost entirely covered in Hebrew inscriptions; descendants visit it each year and leave stones on the graves.

The site today

The location of the synagogue within Mliečno has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what stands on its plot today. No surviving fragment of the building is recorded, and the first page of the Hungarian heritage register's listings for the village includes the chapel, crosses and the Jewish cemetery but no synagogue. The cemetery is the main surviving trace of the community; it lies in an open, unmarked setting and is visited by descendants. The map pin is placed on the centre of Mliečno as given by OpenStreetMap and should not be read as the synagogue's exact position. Local histories, Lajos Csiba and Lajos Presinszky's Fejezetek Tejfalu történetéből (1993) and Ernő Ozogány's Tejfalu írásban és képben (2017), may locate the site.

Notable names