Nižný Hrabovec Prayer House

סקירה

הסיפור של Nižný Hrabovec Prayer House

Nižný Hrabovec lies in the Prešov region of eastern Slovakia, in the Vranov nad Topľou district, near the road from Strážske. It is an old village: it is documented in 1357 as Garboncha and in 1436 as Harabocz or Harabovecz. After the wars of the early eighteenth century it was nearly empty, with 25 abandoned and only six inhabited households recorded in 1715. Its people lived from farming and fruit growing, and in the nineteenth century the noble Balassa family held a share of the estate.

Jews settled here in the period of repopulation, and by 1837 they numbered 86. The Slovak Wikipedia article on the village says that, probably in the first half of the nineteenth century, they built a prayer house (modlitebňa) in the village. The wording points to a building put up by the community rather than a room in a private house, which is why it is catalogued here, but no description, plan or photograph of it has been found. The same article says the prayer house ceased to exist soon after the Second World War. The only visible trace of Jewish life left in the village is the site of the Jewish cemetery, now in woodland. Almost everything else about the building remains to be found in archives.

מיקום

Where it stood for nearly 95 years

Historic: Nižný Hrabovec (Harabovecz); street and house number unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of the village, 094 21 Nižný Hrabovec, Vranov nad Topľou district (approximate).

פתיחת מפה גדולה ←

הקהילה היהודית

The Jewish community of Nižný Hrabovec was a small rural congregation in the hill country of north-eastern Slovakia, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Slovak Wikipedia article on the village gives 86 Jews in 1837, a sizeable share of a village that had been almost deserted a century earlier. The occupations of these families, their religious affiliation and the names of their leaders are not recorded in any source read for this entry. Later population figures for the Jews of the village, from the censuses of 1869 to 1930, were not found, so it is unknown whether the community grew or shrank before 1938. A Jewish cemetery belonged to the community; it was reported to the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies by Bobby Furst in July 2002. The village had 1,618 inhabitants in all at the time of that report. Whether the congregation kept its own rabbi, a teacher or a ritual slaughterer, or depended on a larger neighbouring community such as Vranov or Strážske, is unknown.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

Nothing is known about the appearance of the prayer house. The only source found calls it a modlitebňa, the Slovak word for a prayer house or prayer hall, and says the Jews built it, which suggests a small free-standing building rather than a room in a dwelling. Whether it had a separate gallery or room for women, which would distinguish a prayer hall from a converted dwelling, is not documented. No plan, survey, drawing or photograph of it was found, and it does not appear in Maroš Borský's survey of synagogue architecture in Slovakia (2005). Its size, its building material, the date of any rebuilding, the builder and the arrangement of the interior are all unknown, as is whether it stood near the Jewish cemetery at the edge of the village or among the houses of the village street.

החיים בבית הכנסת

No account of worship or communal life in the Nižný Hrabovec prayer house has been found. With 86 Jews in 1837, the community was large enough to gather a minyan, the quorum of ten men needed for public prayer, on Sabbaths and festivals, which is presumably why it put up a building of its own rather than travelling to a neighbouring town. Whether it followed Orthodox practice, held daily as well as Sabbath services, or also served as a schoolroom for the children is not attested for this village. The names of any rabbi, cantor, teacher or warden connected with the building are not known, and no records of the congregation, such as minute books or registers, have been identified. The community's cemetery, recorded in 2002, shows that the Jews of the village also buried their dead locally, which points to a settled congregation with its own burial society.

הרס

The only statement on the fate of the building is the Slovak Wikipedia article's sentence that the prayer house ceased to exist soon after the Second World War (zanikla čoskoro po 2. svetovej vojne). The verb used, zaniknúť, means that the building disappeared; it does not say whether it was demolished, taken down for its materials, converted beyond recognition or left to fall down. No source found records damage to the building during the war, in 1942 or later. After the war no Jewish congregation is recorded in the village, so the empty building had no users. Who removed it, in which year and on whose orders is not recorded in any source read, and it is not known whether the property passed to the state, to the municipality or to a private owner. The agricultural cooperative founded in the village in 1952 shows that the last stage falls in the early years of Communist rule, but no link between the two has been documented.

גורל הקהילה

In 1942 the Slovak State, an ally of Nazi Germany, deported most of its Jews. Department 14 of the Central Economic Office organised the transports, and members of the Hlinka Guard, the Freiwillige Schutzstaffel and the gendarmerie rounded up the Jews and loaded them into cattle cars. For the Vranov nad Topľou district, a transport list of about 1,060 people dated 18 May 1942 survives in the district archives in Vranov, and the transport recorded as leaving Vranov on 19 May 1942 took 1,005 people to Opole in the Lublin district of occupied Poland, with Kazimierz as a secondary destination. Whether the Jews still living in Nižný Hrabovec in 1942 were on the Vranov transport, and how many of them there were, has not been established; no village name appears in the summary of the transcribed list. The number of victims and of any survivors from the village is unknown, and no Jewish community is recorded there after 1945.

האתר כיום

The site of the prayer house has not been identified, so it is not known what stands there today. Nižný Hrabovec is a village of about 1,600 inhabitants. The Jewish cemetery is the only Jewish site recorded in the village. According to the European Jewish cemetery survey it lies in dense forest, reached by turning left at the entrance to the village when coming from Strážske; it is demolished, no gravestones survive, and the land belongs to the municipality. The map pin for this entry is placed at the centre of the village and does not mark the prayer house. Finding the plot will need the cadastral maps of the nineteenth century or the land registers held in the state archives, or the memory of older residents.

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