La historia de Mostová Synagogue
Mostová, called Hidaskürt in Hungarian, is a farming village on the Dudváh river in the Galanta district, east of Bratislava. Until 1920 it belonged to the Galanta district of Pozsony county in the Kingdom of Hungary; from 1938 to 1945 it was again part of Hungary. Its Jewish community was a small rural one, but in the late nineteenth century it was a noticeable part of the village: the Slovak Wikipedia article on the village, followed by the heritage gazetteer Pamiatky na Slovensku, gives 128 Jews among 1,752 inhabitants in 1896, about seven per cent of the population.
According to the same accounts, the Jews built their own house of prayer in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Slovak text calls it first a modlitebňa (prayer house) and then a synagóga, and says that it stood next to what is now the Slovak-language primary school. It is therefore described as a separate building rather than a room in a private house, but nothing else is known about its form, date or size. The community's other surviving trace is its cemetery at the end of the village near Čierny Brod. The synagogue is not among the buildings catalogued by Maroš Borský in his 2005 survey of Slovak synagogue architecture, and it does not appear in the published list of synagogues in Slovakia on English Wikipedia. It was demolished in the 1950s.
Where it stood
Historic: Hidaskürt, Galanta district, Pozsony county; street and house number unknown, next to the site of today's Slovak-language primary school. Today: Mostová, okres Galanta, 925 07, beside the Slovak primary school (approximate; the pin marks the village centre on road 1356).
Abrir mapa ampliado →La comunidad judía
Very little has been published about the Jews of Mostová. The only population figure found is the one given in the Slovak Wikipedia article on the village: in 1896, 128 of its 1,752 inhabitants were of the Jewish faith. The Hungarian Wikipedia article gives the language census figures for 1880 to 1941, when the village was overwhelmingly Hungarian-speaking, but does not break them down by religion, so how the Jewish population changed before and after 1896 is unknown. The Jewish cemetery lies at the edge of the village near Čierny Brod; the International Jewish Cemetery Project recorded it in 2009 as a plot of about 30 by 20 metres behind a broken masonry wall, with three nineteenth-century marble, granite and sandstone tombstones bearing Hebrew inscriptions. The cemetery's age suggests that Jews were settled in the village by the nineteenth century. Mostová lay within a few kilometres of Galanta, the seat of a large Orthodox community, but no source consulted says whether the Mostová Jews formed an independent congregation or were attached to Galanta, nor names any rabbi, teacher, cantor or community officer.
Arquitectura y diseño
No photograph, drawing, plan or description of the building has been found, so its appearance is unknown. The only facts recorded are that the Jews of Mostová built it themselves in the second half of the nineteenth century and that it stood beside the site of the present Slovak-language primary school. The Slovak source calls it both a prayer house and a synagogue. The word modlitebňa usually denotes a modest prayer house rather than a monumental synagogue, and a community of little more than a hundred people is unlikely to have built anything large, but this is an inference from the wording and the size of the community, not a documented fact. The architect or builder, the building materials, the seating capacity and the arrangement of the interior are all unknown. Borský's survey, which records several small rural prayer houses elsewhere in Slovakia, does not include Mostová, so no measured survey or archival photograph of the building is known to exist in the main scholarly catalogue.
La vida dentro de la sinagoga
No account of religious life in the Mostová synagogue has been found. No source names a rabbi, cantor, ritual slaughterer or teacher who served the village, and no record of the congregation's rite, its societies or its school was located. After the Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868 the community of nearby Galanta, which Encyclopaedia Judaica describes as having chosen the Orthodox path and famous for its yeshiva and its yearly celebration of the seventh of Adar, was the religious centre of the district. Whether the Mostová Jews looked to Galanta for a rabbi, for their burial society or for kosher meat is not documented. The existence of a separate prayer house and of a village cemetery shows that the community was large enough in the late nineteenth century to hold its own services, but the sources do not describe them, and when regular services ended is unknown.
Destrucción
The Slovak Wikipedia article on Mostová and the heritage gazetteer Pamiatky na Slovensku, which repeats it, say only that the synagogue was demolished in the 1950s. Neither gives an exact year, the reason for the demolition or the body that carried it out, and the village's own history page does not mention the building at all; who demolished it is not recorded. The 1950s were the first decade of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. In Mostová the post-war years also brought resettlement: Hungarian residents lost their civil rights, some were sent to forced labour in the Czech lands or expelled to Hungary, and Slovak families from Hungary were settled in their place. One of these groups bought a former inn in the 1950s and turned it into a Lutheran prayer house. Whether the empty synagogue was demolished by the authorities or by a buyer is unknown.
El destino de la comunidad
Under the Vienna Award of 1938 Mostová, like Galanta, was annexed to Hungary, and Hungarian anti-Jewish laws applied there until 1945. After Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, the Jews of the Galanta area were concentrated and deported. According to the Pinkas Hakehillot entry for Galanta, a ghetto was set up around the Galanta synagogue on 5 June 1944, about 600 Jews from nearby communities were brought into it, and its inmates were then taken to a camp at Komárno and deported to Auschwitz on 13 June 1944; Encyclopaedia Judaica instead says the Jews of Galanta and its environs were assembled in the Kurzweil brick factory in Nové Zámky and about 1,560 were deported on 26 June 1944. Neither source names Mostová, and it is unknown how many Jews still lived in the village in 1944, where exactly they were taken or how many survived. No Jewish community is recorded in Mostová after the war; Soviet troops entered the village on 31 March 1945.
El lugar hoy
According to the Slovak Wikipedia article and Pamiatky na Slovensku, the synagogue stood next to the present Slovak-language primary school in Mostová. The exact plot has not been identified, and no remains of the building are recorded. The village's present schools date from the Communist period and later: a new twelve-class Hungarian-language primary school opened in 1967, and the separate Slovak school is not dated in the sources found. The map pin for this entry uses the coordinates published by Pamiatky na Slovensku, which fall on the main road through the village centre and are no more precise than the description beside the school. The Jewish cemetery at the end of the village near Čierny Brod survives, unmarked and threatened by pollution and erosion.
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