Opoj Synagogue

The Jewish community

Little is recorded about the Jews of Opoj. The village website places their settlement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when several noble families invited Jews onto their estates to develop the land and local trade, and it suggests that the Szászy family, who owned much of Opoj, gave them land for a cemetery and a prayer house. The oldest gravestones in the cemetery probably dated from that period. Elek Fényes's gazetteer, compiled around 1851, recorded 66 Jewish inhabitants beside 577 Catholics, and Vályi's earlier description lists the landowners as the Ernyei, Szászy, Nedeczky and Turóczy families. The cemetery, of about 1,730 square metres, was unusually large for the village because it also served Jews from neighbouring villages, which suggests that Opoj was a small religious centre for scattered rural families. Opoj had no rabbi in the sources found: in the twentieth century the merchant Bernát Diamant carried out the duties of shochet and spiritual leader. The website names the Diamant and Polák families as the last Jews living in the village. Membership figures for the twentieth century and the community's affiliation (Orthodox, Neolog or Status Quo) are unknown.

Architecture and design

The only description of the building comes from the village website, which cites no documents. The synagogue was a single-storey building of fired brick with a gabled roof, standing in the continuous row of houses in the oldest part of Opoj. Its street front differed little from the neighbouring houses: the most noticeable features were the yellow exterior paint, which the author notes was typical of several synagogues, and semicircular arched windows. The main entrance was from the courtyard, not the street, and women had a separate entrance leading up to their gallery. The women's gallery was of wood, decorated with carved ornament and carried on two beams. The almemor, the platform for reading the Torah, stood in the middle of the hall, and the Torah ark was set into a niche in the east wall. Outbuildings used for kosher slaughter adjoined the prayer house. The architect, the date of construction, the dimensions and the seating capacity are unknown, and no plan, photograph or drawing has been found.

Life inside the synagogue

Services followed the arrangement described on the village website: men and women prayed together in one building but sat apart, the men in the hall around the central almemor and the women in the carved wooden gallery reached by their own entrance. The Torah scrolls were kept in the ark niche in the east wall. The community had no rabbi of its own in the sources found. Religious leadership and ritual slaughter were in the hands of the local Jewish merchant Bernát Diamant, who served as shochet and as the congregation's spiritual leader until 1944; the slaughtering was done in outbuildings next to the synagogue. The building served not only the few Jewish families of Opoj but a wider circle of Jews from the surrounding villages, and it remained in use for that purpose during the Second World War. The large cemetery near the boundary with Vlčkovce was used in the same way, and burials took place there until the last deportations in 1944. No records of services, officers, schooling or ritual objects from this synagogue have been found.

Destruction

No damage to the synagogue during the Second World War is recorded. The building remained in use by Jews from the surrounding villages during the war and stood empty after its last worshippers were deported. According to the village website, the synagogue was demolished after the end of the war, once it was clear that none of the deported Jews would return to live in Opoj permanently. The source gives no year for the demolition, and who decided on it or carried it out is not recorded; it is not known whether the building was first sold, or whether the demolition took place before or after the Communist takeover of February 1948. The Slovak heritage gazetteer pamiatkynaslovensku.sk repeats the same account and also gives no date or actor. The Jewish cemetery suffered a similar fate in the postwar period, when new housing was built on and around its site, and it no longer exists. No fragment of the synagogue is known to survive.

The community’s fate

Under the Slovak State, the Jews of Slovakia were stripped of their property through Aryanization laws from 1940 and then deported. Between March and October 1942 the Slovak government, with the Hlinka Guard and the gendarmerie rounding up the victims, deported almost 58,000 Jews to Auschwitz and to ghettos and camps in the Lublin district; only a few hundred survived. After Nazi German forces occupied Slovakia in the autumn of 1944, following the Slovak National Uprising, about 13,500 more Jews were deported and many others were murdered by Einsatzgruppe H and Hlinka Guard units. The village website says that Bernát Diamant served the Opoj community until 1944, that burials in the cemetery continued until the last deportations that year, and that the Diamant and Polák families were the last Jews of the village. The names and number of Opoj Jews deported in 1942 and 1944 are unknown. None of the deportees returned to settle in Opoj after the war, and no Jewish community existed there afterwards.

The site today

The exact plot of the synagogue has not been identified in the sources read. The village website places it in the row of houses in the oldest part of Opoj, and the Slovak heritage gazetteer pamiatkynaslovensku.sk gives coordinates that fall on a house in F. Hlavičku street, number 185/31, near the village centre; the gazetteer does not say how the point was fixed, so the location should be treated as approximate. No remains of the synagogue or its outbuildings are known, and no marker on the site is recorded. The Jewish cemetery, which lay at the edge of the village on the left side of the road to Vlčkovce, has also disappeared under postwar housing.

Notable names