Mutěnín Synagogue

The Jewish community

Jewish families are said to have settled in Muttersdorf during the Thirty Years' War. The earliest written evidence is a report of 1669 by Tobias Hankelia, parish priest of Domažlice (Taus), which states that Abraham Ditl lived in house No. 85 in 1635. In 1669 six Jewish families with about forty people lived in the village, and in 1747 there were fourteen families with 49 members. The community peaked in the 1830s: Jüdische Gemeinden gives 154 Jews in 1832, counting those of nearby Wasserau (Ostrov), and 110 in 1837. Numbers then fell steadily as families moved to the towns. The village website gives 65 in 1880, 43 in 1900, six families with 23 people in 1920 and 21 people in 1930; Jüdische Gemeinden gives about 90 around 1880 and in 1893. In its last years the congregation was kept going with the help of a few families from Weißensulz, Wasserau, Schwanenbrückl and Hostau. Its lay leaders included Jonas Fleischner, Simon Schwarzkopf and Bernhard Oesterreicher from the 1850s, Oesterreicher serving until 1897, then Albert Wolf until 1921 and Ferdinand Steiner from 1921. Jewish registers survive from 1793.

Architecture and design

The first synagogue, built around 1660, was a small wooden structure. Its 1860 successor was a masonry building in the classicist style; JewishGen's cemetery survey names its master builder as Georg Halla, and the village website records a costly reconstruction in 1923. Two historic photographs show the exterior. The entrance front was a broad gable treated as a triangular pediment, with a moulded cornice and a Star of David on the apex. Below it was a round window, and at ground level a round-arched doorway. The walls were plastered and whitewashed, and the hall had a pitched roof. The long side wall had a tall round-arched window above a small round window, a two-storey arrangement that suggests a women's gallery inside. The building stood free on an unpaved village square beside two-storey gabled houses. An interior photograph shows tall round-arched windows, a Torah ark framed by columns and a pediment beneath the tablets of the Law and a round window, and in front of it a raised reader's platform enclosed by an ornamental iron railing with candelabra. The capacity and the exact plan are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

The synagogue was the centre of a small rural congregation that also kept a rabbi's house containing a mikveh, a ritual bath, and had its seat in house No. 131, which no longer stands. A Jewish school is mentioned as early as 1743 or 1747 in the house later numbered 67, on the plot where the 1860 synagogue was built; a Jewish elementary school operated from 1829 to 1870. No rabbi of Muttersdorf is named in the sources consulted. The congregation was run by its elected leaders: Jonas Fleischner, Simon Schwarzkopf and Bernhard Oesterreicher in the 1850s, Albert Wolf until 1921 and Ferdinand Steiner afterwards. The dead were buried in the community's own cemetery on the Hinterer Schafberg south-east of the village, laid out around 1640, where people from Wasserau (Ostrov) and Schwanenbrückl (Mostek) were also buried. The interior photograph shows a well-furnished hall with an ornate ark and an enclosed reader's platform, and the 1923 reconstruction shows that the congregation still invested in the building when it numbered only a few families.

Destruction

By 1938 the congregation had shrunk so far that it was dissolved, and the synagogue lost its users. Jüdische Gemeinden states only that the synagogue building was destroyed during the Nazi period, and the village website, drawing on the historian V. Fred Chvátal of the Tachov museum, says the same, without a date. JewishGen's International Jewish Cemetery Project entry for Mutěnín gives the most specific account: the synagogue was blown up by the Nazis in 1938. A hiking guide entry for the Jewish cemetery likewise says the synagogue was destroyed by the Nazis. None of these sources names the unit or the officials responsible, gives a day or month, or says whether the building was first looted or burned. No document of the destruction was found, and no source mentions any remains of the building being cleared after 1945.

The community’s fate

The Jewish community of Muttersdorf ceased to exist in 1938. According to the village website and Jüdische Gemeinden, only one Jewish family was still living in the village in 1939, during the German occupation. Most members had left in the preceding decades for larger towns, and their later fates are largely unknown; the last community leader, Ferdinand Steiner, still in office in 1934, is recorded with the note that his further fate is unknown. Yad Vashem's records, as cited by both the village website and Jüdische Gemeinden, list nine Holocaust victims from Mutěnín. The sources consulted do not say where these nine lived at the time of deportation, which transports took them or where they were murdered. No Jewish community was re-established in the village after the Second World War. The cemetery on the Hinterer Schafberg survives with about 160 gravestones and fragments, the oldest legible ones from the first half of the eighteenth century, though it has suffered from vandalism and neglect.

The site today

The synagogue stood on a plot formerly occupied by three houses, one of them house No. 67, according to the village website, but the sources consulted do not identify that plot on a present-day map or say what stands there now. No remains of the building are recorded. The map pin for this entry marks the centre of the village and not the synagogue itself. The Jewish cemetery, about a kilometre south-east of the village on the Hinterer Schafberg in the Český les nature park, is the community's surviving site; it is reached by a marked path and holds about 160 gravestones and fragments.

Notable names