Die Geschichte von Ozora Synagogue
Ozora is a village in the Tamási district of Tolna county, in the valley of the Sió. Its Jewish community was small: Anikó Gazda's gazetteer gives no figures for 1828 or 1851, then 103 Jews in 1910 and 48 in 1941. The community nevertheless had a purpose-built synagogue, which Gazda classes as a synagogue proper and not as a prayer room. Gazda gives no building date; the Tolna county local-history blog Régmúlt calls it a simple, small synagogue of the late nineteenth century.
The only known view is a photograph in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, mounted on an album page lettered 'Ozora 1949'. It shows a free-standing hall with a stepped gable to the street, a low porch on two piers and pointed-arch windows along the side. By then the building was shuttered, plaster had fallen from the gable and from around the upper windows, and a paling fence closed the plot.
The deportations of 1944 ended Jewish life in the Hungarian provinces, and nothing found for this entry shows the synagogue in use afterwards. When Gazda surveyed synagogue sites between 1980 and 1987 she recorded the Ozora building as demolished. The demolition therefore falls between 1949 and 1987, under Communist rule, but no source read gives the year, the owner at the time or the name of whoever pulled it down. Its street address is also unknown.
Where it stood
Historic: Ozora, Tolna county; street and house number unknown. Today: Unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of 7086 Ozora, Tolna county (approximate).
Größere Karte öffnen →Die jüdische Gemeinde
Very little about the Jews of Ozora could be read for this entry. Gazda's county table for Tolna leaves the columns for 1828 and 1851 blank and records 103 Jews in 1910 and 48 in 1941, so the community more than halved in the three decades before the Holocaust. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929, which describes many provincial congregations, has no entry for Ozora, so the names of its officers, the size of its budget and its institutions between the wars are unknown. The Hebrew-language Pinkas Hakehillot volume for Hungary does include an Ozora entry, at page 137, but it has not been translated on JewishGen and was not read. Whether the congregation was Orthodox, Neolog or Status Quo is not confirmed: the picture linked from the English Wikipedia list carries a file name that labels it Orthodox, which is a lead and not evidence. No rabbi, cantor, teacher or community president of Ozora is named in any source read, and the date at which Jews first settled in the village was not found.
Architektur und Gestaltung
The description rests on one photograph of 1949. The synagogue was a free-standing, rendered masonry hall under a pitched tiled roof, set gable-end to a village street. The street front ended in a stepped gable of about a dozen steps on each side, crowned by a turned finial, with a round moulded window frame at its centre. A moulded cornice divided the gable from the wall below, and an urn-shaped pendant ornament hung at the corner of the eaves. Beneath the cornice were two arched upper windows fitted with louvred shutters, and between them a wide semicircular window with glazing bars. Under that window a low porch with its own pitched roof, carried on two short, thick square piers, sheltered the entrance. To the right of the porch were two smaller shuttered openings at ground level. The long side wall had tall, narrow pointed-arch windows with small panes; two are visible. A brick gate pier with a stepped cap and a wooden paling fence closed the plot to the street. The architect, the builder, the seating capacity and the interior are unknown.
Leben in der Synagoge
No account of services, customs or daily use of the Ozora synagogue was found, and no interior photograph is known. What can be said comes from the building itself and from the population figures. With 103 Jews in the village in 1910, the hall would have served a few dozen families at most, and by 1941 fewer than fifty people. The 1949 photograph shows the features of a working village synagogue: a porch sheltering the entrance on the street front, upper windows on that front that may have lit a women's gallery above the entrance, and tall windows down the side lighting the prayer hall. That reading of the plan is an inference from the exterior only. Whether the community kept its own rabbi or was served from a larger congregation nearby is unknown, as are the rite it followed, any school it kept and the societies attached to it. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 is silent on Ozora, and the Pinkas Hakehillot entry, which probably answers some of these questions, remains untranslated.
Zerstörung
No source read describes damage to the synagogue during the war or names anyone who looted or emptied it. The building lost its congregation in 1944. Five years later it was photographed for the series of provincial synagogue photographs kept in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives; the album page is lettered 'Ozora 1949'. The roof and walls were intact, but the building was shuttered and neglected: render had dropped from the top of the stepped gable, exposing the brick, and the plaster had been broken away around both upper windows of the street front, the right-hand one of which appears to have lost its shutters. What caused that damage is unknown. Anikó Gazda, who surveyed Hungarian synagogue sites between 1980 and 1987, marked the Ozora synagogue as demolished, and the author of the Régmúlt blog wrote in 2017 that he had found neither its site nor the date of its destruction. The demolition therefore took place between 1949 and 1987, when Hungary was under Communist rule. No source found says in which year, whether the building had first been sold, or who ordered and carried out the work, so nobody can be named.
Das Schicksal der Gemeinde
Gazda records 48 Jews in Ozora in 1941, down from 103 in 1910. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944 Hungarian gendarmerie officials, working under the guidance of Nazi German SS officials, deported about 440,000 Jews from Hungary, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the majority were murdered after selection on arrival; by the end of July Budapest held the only Jewish community left in the country. The Jews of Ozora must have been among the provincial communities destroyed in that operation, but no source read for this entry describes their particular fate: the ghetto they were sent to, the place and date of entrainment, the number killed and the number who came back are all unknown here. No evidence was found of a congregation in Ozora after the war. The 1949 photograph shows the synagogue closed up, and Gazda's survey of the 1980s found it gone. The Pinkas Hakehillot entry for Ozora and Randolph Braham's work on the deportations from Tolna county are the places to look for the missing details.
Der Ort heute
The plot on which the synagogue stood has not been identified in any source read, so what occupies it today cannot be stated. The 1949 photograph shows the building set back a little from a village street behind a paling fence, with a brick gate pier at one corner, a low tiled house on its left and the gable of another house close on its right, but it names no street. No surviving fragment of the building and no marker on the site is recorded in the sources consulted. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Ozora and should not be read as the synagogue's location. Fixing the address will need a cadastral map of the village or local knowledge.
Haben Sie etwas beizutragen?
Fotos, Dokumente, Familiengeschichten oder Erinnerungen an diese Synagoge und ihre Gemeinde halten ihre Geschichte lebendig.
- Zsinagógák és zsidó községek Magyarországon (Tolna county table)
- Ozora, zsinagóga (photograph, inventory no. F16.062, dated 1949)
- Ozorai zsinagóga (scan from glass negative)
- A zsidó emlékek Tolna megyében. Bevezetés (section on destroyed synagogues: Ozora)
- List of synagogues in Hungary (Tolna county table)
- Magyarországi zsinagógák listája (Tolna megye)
- Ozora
- Magyar Zsidó Lexikon (1929), headword list
- Pinkas Hakehillot Hungary: Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities, Hungary (table of contents)
- Deportation of Hungarian Jews (timeline entry)
- Ozora (OpenStreetMap relation 1403108)
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