Myjava Synagogue

The Jewish community

According to Jüdische Gemeinden, which draws on the Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust, Jews came to Myjava in the seventeenth century, driven out of parts of Moravia. The community was at first attached to the congregation of Strážnice (Straßnitz) in Moravia and became autonomous around the middle of the nineteenth century; its first rabbi was Joseph Honig. Besides the synagogue it ran an elementary school and a Talmud Torah, and a burial society, the Chevra Kadisha, looked after the Jewish cemetery. The community counted 75 people in 1786, 183 in 1828 and 430 in 1880, its highest figure. In the revolutionary unrest of 1848 a mob looted and partly destroyed Jewish property in the town. Emigration grew around 1900 and increased after the First World War, partly encouraged by Zionist activity, so that there were 204 Jews in 1919, about 165 in 1930 and about 110 in 1940. The Orthodox community of nearby Turá Lúka, with its own prayer house and mikveh, was a separate congregation.

Architecture and design

The architecture is known only from one undated black-and-white photograph published by TIK Záhorie and reproduced by Jüdische Gemeinden. It shows the entrance front of a free-standing rendered hall, seen almost straight on. The facade is divided into two bays by three flat pilasters standing on a low plinth. Each bay has a round-arched doorway at ground level, perhaps one for men and one leading to a women's gallery, and a tall round-arched window above. Over a plain cornice rises a large curved gable with a scalloped outline of three lobes, its lower edge carrying a painted Hebrew inscription in two lines; a small square opening sits at the centre. A lower roof joins at the left and the long side wall runs back at the right. The curved gable recalls late Baroque and early nineteenth-century synagogues of Moravia and western Slovakia, but no source describes the style, and the architect, builder, seating capacity, interior and Torah ark are all unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

Very little is recorded about worship in the building. Jüdische Gemeinden names Joseph Honig as the first rabbi of the independent community, but gives no dates for his service, and no later rabbis, cantors or officers were found in the sources read. The synagogue formed part of a small communal group with the elementary school and the Talmud Torah; the town chronicle notes that the Jewish school stood near the synagogue. The two doors in the photograph suggest separate entrances, possibly for men and for women going up to a gallery, but this is an inference from the picture. The Hebrew inscription on the gable, which would have given a verse and perhaps a date, cannot be read with confidence in the available reproduction. With the community shrinking from 430 people in 1880 to about 110 in 1940, the synagogue in its last decades served a congregation of a few dozen families.

Destruction

Jüdische Gemeinden states that during the Nazi German occupation of 1944-45 the synagogue's interior furnishings were destroyed and the building was turned into a stable. The source does not say whether German troops or local men did the damage. After the war few Jews returned, and the building was not used again as a synagogue. The TIK Záhorie report of 2016 says only that it was demolished after the war. The Myjava town chronicle for 2016 is more precise: it records that the synagogue was demolished in 1964-1966, and that the Jewish school standing nearby met the same fate in 1968. Both demolitions therefore took place under the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. No source read names the body that ordered or carried out the demolition, or says whether the building was first sold or transferred by the Jewish community.

The community’s fate

When the Second World War began about 120 Jews lived in Myjava. Under the Slovak State they were subject to its anti-Jewish laws and to harassment by the Hlinka Guard. Deportations began in late March 1942, first to Auschwitz and Majdanek; in the summer of 1942 whole families were sent to ghettos and camps in the Lublin district of occupied Poland. When Nazi German troops entered the area in September 1944, the Jews who had remained were seized and deported as well, and only a few escaped. According to Jüdische Gemeinden only a few survivors came back after the war, and no organised community was re-established. The number of victims from Myjava is not stated in the sources read, although the 2016 commemoration at the synagogue site read out some five hundred names of Holocaust victims.

The site today

The synagogue stood in the courtyard of the former Myjava Bank, next to Námestie M. R. Štefánika in the centre of the town. The plot is now the town marketplace (trhovisko), with a grassed area beside it. No part of the building survives. A black granite memorial with a Star of David, unveiled on 18 September 2016, stands on the site and says that a synagogue stood here. The Jewish school that stood nearby has also gone, while the Jewish cemetery of Myjava survives on a hillside in the town.

Notable names