Nagyecsed Synagogue

La comunidad judía

Pinkas Hakehillot gives the Jewish population of Nagyecsed as 16 in 1815, 117 in 1880, 236 in 1900, 533 in 1930 and 600 in 1941, out of 7,534 inhabitants in that year. The ESJF figures are close: 117 in 1880, 355 in 1910, 533 in 1930 and 586 in 1941. The early settlers came after the Ecsed marshes were drained, and Jews took part in the farming and trade of the reclaimed land. For a long period the small group belonged to the community of Nyírmeggyes before it organised its own institutions. Pinkas Hakehillot describes it as an Orthodox community whose members were known for their great piety, while ESJF calls it a Status Quo Ante congregation with 569 members, 59 of them taxpayers, and no rabbi of its own; the two descriptions may refer to different dates. The community employed a rabbi, a ritual slaughterer, a beadle and a teacher. There was no Jewish day school: children went to the Christian school and received religious lessons from a Jewish teacher.

Arquitectura y diseño

No description, photograph, drawing or plan of the Nagyecsed synagogue has been found in any source consulted, so its architecture is unknown. Pinkas Hakehillot and ESJF agree only that it was built in or around 1850. At that date the community was very small, numbering a few dozen people at most, which suggests a modest building rather than a monumental one, but that is an inference from the population figures and not a documented fact. Whether it was enlarged or rebuilt as the community grew to several hundred members in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is not recorded. Its street, plot, dimensions, materials, seating capacity, the arrangement of the women's gallery and the form of the Torah ark are all unknown. The architect and builder are not named in any source. The only other communal building recorded is the Talmud Torah, a separate house built in 1920 that held the cheder, the elementary religious school for boys.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

Pinkas Hakehillot describes the congregation as strictly Orthodox and notably pious. Its religious life centred on the synagogue and was served by a rabbi, a ritual slaughterer, a beadle and a teacher of young children. Because the town had no Jewish day school, boys and girls attended the Christian school and were taught religion separately by a Jewish teacher; from 1920 the boys' traditional learning took place in the purpose-built Talmud Torah and cheder. The last rabbi named in the sources is David Teitelbaum, called 'the old rabbi of the community'; Pinkas Hakehillot gives the dates 1912-1944 beside his name without saying whether they are his years of office. ESJF, apparently describing an earlier date, says the community had no rabbi, so it may at times have depended on the rabbinate of a neighbouring town. In the spring of 1944, right after Passover, the synagogue and the rabbi's house were used as the assembly point where the Jews of Nagyecsed were concentrated before their removal.

Destrucción

No source found records damage to the synagogue before 1944. Immediately after Passover that year the building was used to hold the town's Jews for two days before they were taken away, and after that it stood empty. Pinkas Hakehillot Hungary records that the few men who returned from forced labour and from Auschwitz found the synagogue destroyed and the Jewish cemetery desecrated. The source does not say whether the building had been looted, burned or pulled down, nor who was responsible or exactly when it happened between the spring of 1944 and the survivors' return in 1945; who destroyed it is not recorded. The survivors did not rebuild it. After the founding of Israel the community set aside a plot for a new synagogue but then sold that plot, together with the Talmud Torah building, to pay for its members' emigration. Anikó Gazda's survey of 1980-87 recorded the synagogue as demolished.

El destino de la comunidad

From 1941 about 120 Jewish men of Nagyecsed were taken into Hungarian forced-labour service and sent to Ukraine; only a few survived. After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Jews of the town were segregated from their Christian neighbours, forbidden to use the main roads and allowed to buy food for only one hour at noon. Right after Passover they were gathered in the synagogue and the rabbi's house, and two days later about 600 people were moved to the ghetto and camp at Mátészalka, which according to Pinkas Hakehillot held about 17,000 Jews in severe overcrowding and hunger. From there they were deported by train to Auschwitz, among them the elderly Rabbi David Teitelbaum. A small number of forced labourers and camp survivors returned and, with help from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, re-established the community. Most of them emigrated to Israel after 1948. The community was wound up in 1963, when three Jewish families remained.

El lugar hoy

The plot on which the synagogue stood has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what occupies it today. No surviving fragment and no marker on the site is recorded. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Nagyecsed and should not be read as the synagogue's location. The Jewish cemetery survives at the corner of Kossuth Lajos and Dózsa György streets; it is fenced, owned by the local municipality, and some of its 31 gravestones have been restored with the names of Holocaust victims added. Locating the synagogue will need cadastral maps or local archives in Mátészalka or Nyíregyháza.

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