Old Wooden Synagogue of Pečovská Nová Ves

Społeczność żydowska

Pinkas Hakehillot records a single Jewish family in Pečovská Nová Ves in 1744, seven families in 1767, and nine families from Galicia on a taxpayers' list of 1768, most of them peddlers who travelled the villages during the week and came to the weekly fair at Sabinov. An early document names a local Jewish family that made and sold spirits. A document of 1786 allowed Jews to trade at the Sabinov market but refused them shops. The community, by local tradition founded in the middle of the eighteenth century, was one of the oldest in Šariš, and Jews of neighbouring villages belonged to it. Pinkas gives 141 Jews out of 1,237 inhabitants in 1787, 157 in 1828 and 254 in 1880, with a peak of about 280. The village belonged in this period to the counts whom the translation calls Pecheny. Once Jews were allowed to live in Sabinov and the larger towns, many moved away, and some became founders of the Sabinov community; by 1900 only 123 Jews remained in the village.

Architektura i projekt

No description, image or measured drawing of the old synagogue has been found. The evidence that it was built of wood comes from three sources: Borský writes that the masonry synagogue replaced its wooden predecessor; the Šariš regional portal says the community at first had only a wooden synagogue; and Pinkas Hakehillot speaks of the first wood synagogue. Borský's footnote placing the building in the eighteenth century appears in a passage about wooden synagogues and rests on Kovačevičová's survey of wooden churches and other wooden sacral buildings, which notes that such buildings belonged to several denominations, including the Jewish one. Whether it was a log or a timber-framed building, and how its roof was covered, is not recorded. Its builder, size, seating, plan and decoration are unknown, as is its location in the village.

Życie w synagodze

The wooden synagogue was the centre of a community that had a rabbinate from the 1790s. Pinkas Hakehillot names its first rabbi as Itzhak Frankel, who also ran a Talmud Torah of about a dozen pupils. He was followed by Rabbi Shlomo Diamont, who died in 1865, and then by Rabbi Moshe Kohan Gross, who founded a yeshiva in the village with about sixty students. These rabbis served not only Pečovská Nová Ves but some twenty-one surrounding communities. A ritual slaughterer who also taught Hebrew was employed by the congregation. Services, study and the life of the yeshiva in these decades must have taken place in or around the old synagogue, but no source describes its interior or its customs. In 1868, as the community grew, a large classically styled masonry synagogue was dedicated, and after the Hungarian congress of 1868-69 the congregation joined the Orthodox. From 1872 its rabbi was Naftali Sofer, a disciple of the Hatam Sofer, who led the community in the new building.

Zniszczenie

The wooden synagogue was not destroyed by violence. It lost its role as the congregation's house of worship in 1868, when the new masonry synagogue was dedicated; the regional portal notes that the new building is not yet drawn on the 1869 map, so it may have taken some time to complete. According to Borský, citing Kovačevičová (1972, p. 51), the old wooden synagogue was demolished in 1896. Borský's gazetteer entry on the later synagogue, by contrast, says simply that it replaced its wooden predecessor in 1868, which could be read as meaning that the old building went at once; the footnote's 1896 date is the only specific date found. No source says who decided on the demolition or carried it out, or why. The most likely actor is the Jewish community itself, which owned the building, but that is an inference, not a documented fact. What became of its timber and fittings is unknown.

Los społeczności

After the death of Rabbi Naftali Sofer in 1899 the village had no rabbi of its own; after the First World War about ninety Jews remained, attached to the Sabinov rabbinate, and in 1921 they owned four groceries, two taverns, a flour mill and some farms. When the Slovak State was proclaimed in March 1939 about eighty Jews lived in the village; there were 76 in 1940, and from that year they came under the Jewish Centre in Sabinov. On 20 March 1942 young Jewish women of the village were hunted down; Pinkas does not name who seized them. They were taken to the collection point in Poprad and sent on 25 March in the first transport from Slovakia to Auschwitz. Days later young men from the village and its neighbours were deported to Majdanek from a transit camp the translation calls Jelina, probably Žilina. Most of the remaining Jews were deported through Sabinov on 23 May 1942 to the Rejowiec ghetto in the Lublin district. One farming family, protected by an exemption, stayed until May 1944, when it was moved to western Slovakia. A few survivors returned after the war but soon left.

Miejsce dzisiaj

The site of the wooden synagogue has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not known what stands there now. Its masonry successor of 1868 survives in the centre of the village, on an inaccessible plot surrounded by houses. Borský described it in 2005 as an abandoned barn with wooden floors inserted after the Second World War; its roof caved in after 2000 and it is not on the national heritage register. Whether the old wooden building stood on the same plot or elsewhere in the Jewish part of the village is unknown. The Jewish cemetery of Pečovská Nová Ves also survives. The map pin for this entry marks the later synagogue and should be read only as a pointer to the Jewish quarter of the village.

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