First Synagogue of Osoblaha (1570)

הקהילה היהודית

Jewish families first appear in Osoblaha in 1334, when several households fleeing a pogrom were settled in the suburb; according to Jüdische Gemeinden they came from Leobschütz (Głubczyce). By 1420 Jews were allowed to live inside the town itself. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the community grew with refugees from Głubczyce, Prudnik and other Silesian towns, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica records that twelve families from Prudnik arrived in 1570. That year Fiedler counts 132 Jewish families, and in 1616, near the end of the first synagogue's life, 135 families. The Jewish quarter lay in the northern part of the town, in the street along the town wall and around it; it was not a closed ghetto and in 1570 consisted of 22 houses. The community traded in Silesia and Poland and jointly leased the town distillery. The Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that a few years before the Thirty Years' War a threatened expulsion was averted through the intervention of the Council of the Lands. The old cemetery beside the town wall, near the Jewish quarter, was probably founded in the fifteenth century.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

No description, plan, view or archaeological record of the first synagogue has been found. The sources read give only its date and its fate, so its size, materials, plan, style and builder are all unknown. Fiedler's account of the three successive synagogues states that the second and third were built on the same site as the first, which places the 1570 building within the Jewish quarter in the north of the town, in or near the street that ran along the inside of the town wall. That quarter had 22 houses in 1570. Jüdische Gemeinden describes the 1625 replacement as a similar building, which suggests that the second synagogue followed the general form of the first, but it does not say what that form was. Since none of the three synagogues survives, and the whole quarter apart from three houses was destroyed in 1945, there is no physical evidence from which the first building could be reconstructed. Its seating capacity is likewise unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

No record of services, officials or furnishings of the first synagogue has been found in the sources read. Some context for the congregation that used it is known. In the decades around 1600 Osoblaha was home to about 130 Jewish families, many of them refugees or descendants of refugees from Silesian towns, and it was one of the few places in the region where Jews could settle legally. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that important rabbis held office in the community and names one member of this period, Gershon Hayyot Manasse of Hotzenplotz, who served as the first purveyor to the Silesian mint in 1622 to 1624 and later became Moravian chief rabbi. The old cemetery, where many scholars were later buried, served the same congregation; its oldest surviving stones date only from the later seventeenth century. Much of the community's early documentation was lost when its archive burned in the town fire of 1802, which is one reason so little is known about the first synagogue.

הרס

The first synagogue of Osoblaha was destroyed by fire. Jüdische Gemeinden states that it was built in 1570 and burned down in 1625; Jiří Fiedler's guide says it burned before 1626 and that the second synagogue was built on its site in 1625. Neither source gives the cause of the fire, says whether it was confined to the synagogue or spread through the Jewish quarter, or links it to the Thirty Years' War, which had begun in 1618; no source read mentions troops in the town at that date. The building was not left in ruins for long: the congregation rebuilt on the same plot, apparently in the same year, with a similar building. That second synagogue in turn burned in the great town fire of 1802, which also destroyed 32 Torah scrolls and the community's archive. Whether any part of the 1570 structure was reused in the 1625 rebuilding is unknown.

גורל הקהילה

The community that had built the first synagogue outlived it by three centuries. It continued to grow after the Thirty Years' War, taking in Jews expelled from Vienna in 1670, and reached 596 people in 1788 and a peak of 153 families, 845 people, in 1802; in 1842 there were 671 Jews, about 18 per cent of the town. In the second half of the nineteenth century emigration emptied the congregation quickly. Fiedler records that it was attached to the Krnov (Jägerndorf) community probably early in the twentieth century. Thirteen Jews lived in Osoblaha in 1930 and only one in 1934; Jüdische Gemeinden gives none by 1938. The last synagogue on the site was demolished in 1933 after its ritual objects had been transferred to Krnov. In April 1945 the town was almost completely destroyed in the fighting at the end of the Second World War, and the Jewish quarter with it, and the old cemetery was heavily damaged.

האתר כיום

Osoblaha was almost entirely destroyed in the fighting of April 1945. According to Fiedler only three houses of the former Jewish quarter survive; the rest of the quarter, including the plot on which the synagogues stood, is now gardens and lawns. The exact plot has not been identified in the sources read. The old Jewish cemetery, about 150 metres north-north-east of the square on the outer side of the town wall, survives with about 300 gravestones and is a protected monument; it was restored in the early 1990s and is valued for its gravestones of Polish type, unique in the country. A memorial plaque for the former community stands there. The map pin marks the cemetery's information board, at the edge of the former Jewish quarter.

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