Second Synagogue of Osoblaha (1625)

PRZEGLĄD

Historia Second Synagogue of Osoblaha (1625)

Osoblaha, called Hotzenplotz in German sources, lies in the far north of the Czech Republic, in the Bruntál district close to the Polish border. Until 1849 it was an enclave of Moravia surrounded by Silesian territory and governed by Moravian law, so from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, when Jews were barred from living in much of Silesia, it became a refuge for Jewish families and grew one of the largest Jewish communities in the region. The Jewish quarter lay in the northern part of the town, along the street that followed the town wall.

The community's first known synagogue was built after 1569 or in 1570 and burned down by 1625. According to Jiří Fiedler, a second synagogue was built on its site in 1625; the Jüdische Gemeinden site describes it as a building similar to its predecessor. It served the congregation through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period when the community grew from about 135 families to more than 800 people. In 1802 a great fire swept through the town and its Jewish quarter and destroyed the synagogue, its 32 Torah scrolls and the community's archive. A third synagogue was built on the same site in 1807-08. Nothing is known of the appearance of the 1625 building, and no picture of it has been found.

LOKALIZACJA

Where it stood for 177 years

Historic: Jewish quarter, northern part of Hotzenplotz, in the street lining the town wall; plot unknown. Today: approximate; pin at the information board of the old Jewish cemetery, Hrnčířská, 793 99 Osoblaha, Bruntál district.

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Społeczność żydowska

Jewish settlement in Osoblaha is documented from 1334, when several families fleeing a pogrom were settled in the suburb; by 1420 Jews were allowed to live inside the town. In 1415 a decree of the Bishop of Olomouc urged the town to treat its Jews fairly. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries refugees from Głubczyce (Leobschütz), Prudnik and other Silesian towns swelled the community: in 1570 there were 132 Jewish families in 22 houses, and 135 families in 1616. After 1670 Jews expelled from Vienna also arrived. The Seven Years' War hit the community hard and many left, but numbers recovered: 467 in 1763, 596 people in 1788, and a peak of 153 families or 845 people in 1802, the year this synagogue burned. The Familiants Law of 1798 set the permitted number of Jewish families at 135. The quarter was not a closed ghetto; it had 22 houses in 1570 and 39 in 1800.

Architektura i projekt

No description, plan or view of the synagogue of 1625 has been found in the sources consulted. Fiedler records only that it was built on the site of the first synagogue, and the Jüdische Gemeinden site says that it was a building similar to the one that had burned. Its size, materials, layout and the arrangement of its interior are unknown, as are its architect and builder. Because many wooden gravestones in the Jewish cemetery were also lost in the fire of 1802, and the quarter as a whole burned, the building may have been partly or wholly of timber, but no source states this. The site lay within the Jewish quarter in the north of the town near the town wall; the third synagogue, built in 1807-08 in the Baroque style and described as relatively large, stood on the same plot according to Fiedler. The Jüdische Gemeinden site, by contrast, says the 1807-08 building stood next to an older temple, which leaves open whether part of an earlier structure survived.

Życie w synagodze

The building was the religious centre of a large and learned community. Encyclopaedias record that prominent rabbis served Hotzenplotz, but few are named for the years this synagogue stood. The Jewish Encyclopedia names Nathan Feitel as rabbi at Hotzenplotz and Austerlitz in the seventeenth century, the author of a collection of sermons printed at Cracow in 1609 and of a homily printed in 1613 and again in Prague in 1623; whether his rabbinate there fell before or after 1625 is not stated. The Encyclopaedia Judaica mentions a rabbi Gershon Ḥayyot Manasse of Hotzenplotz, later Moravian chief rabbi, who was purveyor to the Silesian mint in 1622-24, but it does not say when he held office in the town. The fire of 1802 is said to have destroyed 32 Torah scrolls kept in the synagogue, an indication of how many households and societies used it. The old cemetery near the quarter, founded in the fifteenth century, has gravestones from 1694 onward, many of a Polish type unique in the Czech lands.

Zniszczenie

In 1802 a great fire destroyed much of Osoblaha. Fiedler writes that the Jewish quarter burned together with the rest of the town, and that the second synagogue burned with it, together with 32 Torah scrolls and the community's rich archive; many wooden gravestones in the cemetery were also lost. The Jüdische Gemeinden site likewise says the synagogue was destroyed in a great fire in 1802. Neither source records how the fire started, and no person or group is blamed for it. The congregation did not restore the burned building but replaced it: in 1807-08 it put up a new, relatively large synagogue in the Baroque style, on the same site according to Fiedler. That successor burned in turn in 1833, was repaired, and was finally pulled down in 1933 because it had become dilapidated, after its ritual objects had gone to the community in Krnov (Jägerndorf). No ruin or fragment of the 1625 building is recorded.

Los społeczności

The fire of 1802 struck the community at its largest. Its numbers then began to fall: the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 589 people in 1830 after a fire that destroyed the Jewish quarter, and Fiedler gives 671 in 1842, about 18 per cent of the town's population. A German-language Jewish school ran from 1803 to 1870. In the second half of the nineteenth century the community emptied quickly as families moved away, mainly for economic reasons, and around 1900 it was dissolving. It was attached to the Krnov community, probably early in the twentieth century. There were 37 Jews in 1921, 13 in 1930 and one in 1934; in 1938 none were recorded. The last synagogue was demolished in 1933 and its records and ritual objects were taken to Krnov. In April 1945 fighting destroyed almost the whole town, including the old Jewish quarter, of which only three houses remain. The cemetery was badly damaged and has since been restored.

Miejsce dzisiaj

The synagogue of 1625 stood in the former Jewish quarter in the northern part of Osoblaha, inside the town wall. Its exact plot has not been identified in the sources consulted; the later synagogue of 1807-08 is said to have occupied the same site and was itself demolished in 1933. The town was almost entirely destroyed in 1945, and only three houses of the Jewish quarter survive; gardens and lawns cover the rest. The old Jewish cemetery, about 150 metres north-north-east of the square just outside the town wall, survives with some 300 gravestones and is a protected monument. The map pin marks the cemetery's information board as the nearest documented point to the quarter, not the synagogue itself.

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