Olaszliszka Synagogue

The Jewish community

The first Jewish family in Olaszliszka is recorded in the census of 1771, and Pinkas Hakehillot dates the organised community to about 1810, when there were 20 families. English Wikipedia, drawing on the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon, gives 70 families with 312 members in the 1830s, Orthodox in rite, among them small traders, craftsmen, farmers and clerks. Jewish wine merchants shipped Tokaj wine to Poland and Russia and employed many other Jews as carters and clerks. In 1872 the community kept an elementary school with 36 pupils and one teacher, helped by local and county authorities, and a Talmud Torah of 25 pupils whose students it housed and fed. A 2026 study in Turizmus Bulletin notes that the Jewish share of the village population rose from 6.8 to 17.6 percent between the eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. After Friedman's death in 1874 the community slowly declined; Pinkas Hakehillot counts 227 Jews in 1930 in a village of about 3,000. Between the wars Jews worked as merchants, distillers, teachers and professionals. Hostility from neighbours was long-standing: in 1925 the rabbi was accused of forging money and later cleared.

Architecture and design

No historic photograph, plan or description of the building was found in this research, so little can be said about its appearance. English Wikipedia and the 2026 Turizmus Bulletin study agree that it was a large hall seating about 500 people, which would have made it one of the bigger synagogues of the Tokaj region and much larger than the village congregation of the twentieth century needed. Wikipedia adds the tradition that Rabbi Friedman had it built without a foundation, as a sign that the exile was temporary and in mourning for the Temple. The building was big enough to house a yeshiva as well as the prayer hall. The surviving east wall, the Mizrach wall, still holds the niche of the Torah ark, which the local heritage trail calls the most important element of the remaining space. The orientation, the length of the hall and the position of the entrance can now be read from the rebuilt west wall, which a 2016 report says was built on the line of the original entrance front. The architect, the builder, the exact building date and the style are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

For more than three decades the synagogue was the court of Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Friedman, a disciple of Moshe Teitelbaum of Sátoraljaújhely and of the Divrei Chaim of Sanz, whose followers came to Olaszliszka from across north-eastern Hungary. He was the author of Ach Pri Tevuah and Hayashar veHatov, and was remembered for his frugality: he refused any rise in his salary of one forint and gave what visitors brought him to the poor. His charge to the community was to keep to the ancient tradition. After his death in 1874 his son-in-law Chaim Friedlander, rabbi of Erdőbénye and author of Tal Chaim, led the Liska Hasidim until 1904, and later generations of the Friedlander family continued the line; a 2016 report says the synagogue served several generations of Liska Rebbes. The building also housed a yeshiva. Friedman's grave in the Olaszliszka Jewish cemetery is still a place of pilgrimage, and the Turizmus Bulletin study puts the number of visitors today at about ten thousand.

Destruction

No source records damage to the synagogue during the Second World War. It stood empty after the deportations of spring 1944, and according to Pinkas Hakehillot and the Turizmus Bulletin study there was no functioning synagogue in the village after 1945, although a 2016 report in The Yeshiva World says the building was used again by the survivors for a time and only abandoned after 1956. The local heritage trail says the interior was still intact in the 1960s and that the building became fully vacant only in the 1970s. The Yeshiva World report says the synagogue declined from the mid-1960s and was then, through "a combination of reasons including local hoodlums, government indifference", systematically destroyed under Communist rule, so that by the late 1970s only the eastern wall was standing. Anikó Gazda's survey of 1980-1987 recorded the building as demolished. No source names the body or the people who pulled the building down, or says whether it was sold for its materials first.

The community’s fate

In 1942 Jewish men up to the age of 42 were taken into labour service. After Nazi German forces occupied Hungary in 1944, the remaining Jews of Olaszliszka, mainly the elderly, women, children and the sick, were moved at the end of April 1944 to the ghetto in Sátoraljaújhely, and from there they were deported to Auschwitz in May 1944. The local heritage trail gives the number deported as 66 families, 242 people. Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Friedlander, son of Chaim Friedlander and the third Liska Rebbe, was killed in the Holocaust. About fifteen people returned, some from Auschwitz and some from labour camps. They met hostility from their neighbours and had no means to rebuild the community, and most left again. By 1957 three Jewish families remained, looking after the old cemetery. No organised community was re-established. The Liska dynasty was refounded in the United States by Rabbi Yosef Friedlander after the war.

The site today

A roofless ruin is all that remains: only the original east wall of the synagogue, with the empty niche of the Torah ark, still stands. The wall was reinforced in 2015-2016 with Hungarian government and European Union funds, and a new wall was built on the line of the old west front so that the length and width of the former hall can be read on the ground; there is no roof and nothing else of the building survives. The open plot between the two walls is now a Holocaust memorial. The site is on Kossuth utca, near the centre of the village, and is mapped in OpenStreetMap. The Jewish cemetery with Rabbi Friedman's grave survives and draws pilgrims.

Notable names