Písečné Synagogue

הקהילה היהודית

Jews are documented in Písečné from the seventeenth century. Joachim Hahn's successor survey counts about 25 families around 1760 to 1770, 32 in 1782, 52 in 1798 and 62 in 1839; the regional guide gives 24 families in 1759, a figure also cited, after Rudolf Hruschka's 1929 history of the community, in Andrea Rutová's thesis on the Jews of the Jindřichův Hradec region, which values their property that year at 2,018 gold coins. In 1848 the village had 333 Jews, about 38 per cent of its people. They lived in three areas: a western quarter of some 24 or 25 houses along the creek, a central group north-east of the castle, and a small eastern group. A Jewish-German elementary school operated from the 1780s. After the end of residence restrictions the community declined: 122 Jews in 1869, 106 in 1880, 111 in 1890 and 64 in 1900. The rabbinate lapsed after 1901, its duties passing to the rabbi of Jemnice around 1905 and to the Třešť rabbinate from 1928.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

Almost nothing is recorded about the building itself. The regional guide places it in the middle of the western part of the Jewish quarter, on the northern bank of the creek that runs through the village, and dates its construction to between 1768 and 1782; the Jüdische Gemeinden survey gives about 1770. That puts it in the late Baroque period, when Moravian village synagogues were usually modest masonry halls with a women's gallery, but no source read describes this one, and its style, dimensions, seating and interior arrangement are unknown. The architect or builder is also unknown. No historical photograph, drawing or plan of the synagogue was found in this research. Several houses of the western quarter survive, about ten of the original two dozen, and they give an idea of the setting in which the synagogue stood, but none of them is identified in the sources as having been part of the synagogue complex.

החיים בבית הכנסת

For about ninety years, from around 1810 to 1901, Písečné was the seat of a rabbinate, and the synagogue served as the main house of prayer for the Jews of the village and of nearby Slavonice, which belonged to the Písečné congregation. The best-known figure associated with it is Rabbi Michael Lazar Kohn, described in the regional guide as one of the most respected Moravian rabbis. He served for 52 years and died on 18 March 1893 aged 83; he is buried in the village's Jewish cemetery. The community also kept a Jewish-German elementary school from the 1780s. After 1901 no rabbi resided in the village: the rabbi of Jemnice took over the duties around 1905, and from 1928 the few remaining Jews belonged to the rabbinate of Třešť. No records of the synagogue's services, cantors or officers were found.

הרס

The sources read record no damage to the synagogue in the Nazi period or during the war. By then the building had lost its purpose: the independent community had dissolved around 1919 or 1920, and the Jüdische Gemeinden survey describes the synagogue as being in a dilapidated state by the postwar years. According to that survey, a few years after the Second World War the former Jewish quarter was demolished together with the synagogue. The regional guide to Jewish monuments in South Bohemia says only that the synagogue was demolished after the Second World War. Neither source gives an exact year, and who ordered or carried out the demolition is not recorded in the sources consulted. The demolition evidently did not take the whole quarter: about ten of the two dozen or so houses of the western Jewish area still stand.

גורל הקהילה

By the time of the Nazi occupation the Jewish community of Písečné had almost disappeared. The Jüdische Gemeinden survey counts 23 Jews in 1921 and 15 in 1930, while the regional guide gives 34 Jews, 2.1 per cent of the population, in 1930. The congregation had ceased to exist as an independent body around 1919 or 1920 and from 1928 belonged to the rabbinate of Třešť. What became of the last Jewish residents of Písečné during the Holocaust is unknown: no source consulted names deportees from the village or gives their number. For nearby Slavonice, whose Jews had belonged to the Písečné congregation, the same survey records that about half of the roughly fifty Jews living there in the early 1930s were murdered. No Jewish community re-formed in Písečné after the war. The great-grandson of Rabbi Michael Lazar Kohn, the economist Jiří Kosta, born in Prague in 1921, is named in the regional guide as a descendant of the community.

האתר כיום

The synagogue's plot in the western part of the village, on the northern bank of the creek, has not been identified more precisely in the sources consulted, and what stands on it today is unknown. About ten houses of the old western Jewish quarter survive, eleven two-storey houses remain in the central quarter north-east of the castle, and the small eastern group has been joined into the Classicist house No. 135. The Jewish cemetery, about 500 metres south-west of the castle, holds some 450 gravestones, the oldest dated 1730; its early nineteenth-century purification house was reconstructed in 1999 and the cemetery is open to visitors, although vegetation is spreading over it. The map pin for this entry marks the centre of the village and not the synagogue's exact site.

שמות בולטים