Large Velența Synagogue, Oradea

PANORAMICA

La storia di Large Velența Synagogue, Oradea

Velența (Hungarian Velence) is a district of Oradea, the Hungarian Nagyvárad, on the Crișul Repede in Bihor county. In the late eighteenth century, according to the historian Edith Bodo, most of the town's Jews lived in Velența, where the community and its chief judge had their seat. The jewish-romania.ro heritage site of Romania's Jewish communities records that a synagogue in Velența is attested from 1749 and appears on a drawing of 1769, beside a branch of the Crișul and the ruins of a church of the Poor Clares. In 1803, it says, the first synagogue in the true sense of the word was reportedly built there in the Baroque style; it became known as the small synagogue. Next to it a much larger synagogue with 1,000 seats was later built. That second building is the subject of this entry. The same source states that both buildings were demolished in 1950. No date of construction, architect, description or photograph of the large synagogue was found. Oradea became one of the great Jewish centres of the region: a 2010 report for the United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad counts 27 synagogues in the city, of which only two were still standing as synagogues. The two Velența buildings were among those lost.

POSIZIONE

Where it stood

Historic: Velence district, Nagyvárad, beside the small synagogue near a branch of the Körös (Crișul Repede); street and number unknown. Today: Velența district, Oradea, Bihor county (approximate).

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La comunità ebraica

Jews were settled in Velența by the eighteenth century. Edith Bodo's study of the Jews of Oradea at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, which deals mainly with the separate community in the Subcetate district by the fortress, notes that the majority of the town's Jews then lived in Velența, where the community had its headquarters and its chief judge. The jewish-romania.ro heritage site places a synagogue there as early as 1749, so Velența was the cradle of organised Jewish life in the town. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the community grew into one of the largest in the region and spread across the city, building more than two dozen synagogues, among them the Neolog Zion temple and the Great Temple. The Wikipedia account of the Oradea ghetto states that Jews made up about 30 percent of the city's population. Which congregation used the large Velența synagogue in its later years, Orthodox or Neolog, is unknown from the sources read.

Architettura e design

Almost nothing is known about the building's form. The only figure recorded is its size: the jewish-romania.ro heritage site describes it as a synagogue of 1,000 places, which made it a large building by the standards of the region and much larger than the small synagogue beside it. The small synagogue of about 1803 is described as Baroque, but no style is given for the large one, and its date of construction is not stated; it was built after the small synagogue and next to it, on or near the site by a branch of the Crișul shown on the drawing of 1769. The architect and builder, the materials, the plan, the arrangement of the women's galleries and the appearance of the street front are all unknown. No photograph, postcard, plan or drawing that can be identified as this building was found in the MILEV photo collection, the Hungaricana postcard collections or the other sources searched in this research.

La vita nella sinagoga

No account of services, rabbis, cantors or officers of the large Velența synagogue was found. What is recorded is the setting. Velența was the historic Jewish quarter of Oradea, the district where, according to Edith Bodo, the community and its chief judge had their seat in the late eighteenth century, and where the community's earliest known synagogue stood from 1749. The large synagogue was built beside that older house of prayer, and with its 1,000 seats it must have served a substantial congregation, but whether it followed the Orthodox or the Neolog rite is not stated in the sources read. The district also had a Jewish cemetery: the Oradea memorial book notes that a gravestone from the city's first Jewish cemetery was later kept in the mortuary of the Velența cemetery. Further detail is probably in the Orthodox and Neolog community chapters of that memorial book, which were not read.

Distruzione

No damage to the building during the Second World War is recorded in the sources read. Its congregation was destroyed in the spring of 1944, when the Hungarian authorities, with gendarmes under Lieutenant-Colonel Jenő Péterffy, shut the Jews of Oradea in a ghetto and deported them to Auschwitz after the Nazi German occupation of Hungary. Northern Transylvania returned to Romania after the war, and the large synagogue survived into the Communist period. The jewish-romania.ro heritage site states plainly that both Velența synagogues, the small one of about 1803 and the large one of 1,000 seats beside it, were demolished in 1950. That was in the early years of Communist rule in Romania, but the source does not say who ordered or carried out the demolition, whether the state, the town authorities or the much reduced Jewish community, which in those years also closed the Zion temple, from 1949 to 1954. No document of the demolition was found.

Il destino della comunità

Oradea belonged to Hungary from 1940 until late 1944. After Operation Margarethe, the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in 1944, the Hungarian authorities confined the Jews of the city in a ghetto in the spring of that year. According to the Wikipedia account, the main ghetto held about 27,000 people and a second ghetto nearly 8,000 Jews from rural communities in about a dozen districts. The local authorities were unusually vehement in their antisemitism, and Hungarian gendarmes under Lieutenant-Colonel Jenő Péterffy searched inmates for valuables at the Dréher brewery. A Jewish council headed by Sándor Leitner, leader of the Orthodox community, ran internal affairs. Nine transports left for Auschwitz on 23, 25, 28, 29 and 30 May and 1, 3, 5 and 27 June 1944, carrying 27,215 Jews. A community re-formed after the war, and in 1947 a memorial was put up in the garden of the Orthodox community building. How many former members of the Velența congregation survived is unknown.

Il luogo oggi

The exact plot of the large synagogue has not been identified. The sources place it only in the Velența district, beside the small synagogue, near a branch of the Crișul Repede and the ruins of a church of the Poor Clares, as shown on the drawing of 1769. Nothing of either building is known to survive, and no marker on the site is recorded. Today Velența is a built-up district of the city, close to its centre. The map pin for this entry marks the district as mapped by OpenStreetMap and should not be read as the synagogue's location. Fixing the site will need the 1769 drawing, old cadastral maps of Nagyvárad or the archives of the Oradea Jewish community.

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