The story of Podbořanský Rohozec Synagogue
Podbořanský Rohozec is a small village in north-western Bohemia, now in the Louny district of the Ústí nad Labem region, on the edge of the Doupov military area. Until 1949 it was officially called Německý Rohozec, and in German Deutsch Rust or Teutschenrust. A Jewish community can be traced there from the middle of the eighteenth century, and in 1816 it built itself a synagogue. The community's other institution was its own cemetery, laid out well outside the village; before it existed, the dead were carried to Maschau (Mašťov) for burial.
Around 1865 the congregation numbered about 290 people, roughly half of the village, which makes Deutsch Rust one of the more strongly Jewish villages of the Saaz (Žatec) area. From the second half of the nineteenth century families moved away to the towns of the region, and by 1930 only 13 Jews were left. The orientalist and explorer Eduard Glaser, born in the village in 1855 as the son of a Jewish travelling merchant and farmer, came from this community, although his family moved to Saaz while he was still a child. The synagogue building outlived the community and was demolished in 1957. No photograph, plan or description of it has been found.
Where it stood for 141 years
Historic: Deutsch Rust (Německý Rohozec), Saaz/Podersam district, Bohemia; street and house number unknown. Today: Podbořanský Rohozec, Louny district, Ústí nad Labem region; exact site unknown, placeholder pin at the village centre (approximate).
Open larger map →The Jewish community
Jews are recorded in Deutsch Rust from the middle of the eighteenth century. The village belonged to the Saaz district of north-western Bohemia, an area of small rural Jewish settlements whose members lived mostly from trade, including peddling, and from farming. The family of Eduard Glaser illustrates this: his father, Salomon Glaser, is described as a Jewish travelling merchant and farmer, and his mother was Maria Kohn. Around 1865 the community had about 290 members, about half of all the inhabitants of the village; JewishGen's cemetery survey gives the same figure for 1864. In the following decades, as elsewhere in rural Bohemia, families left for the towns of the region, and the Glasers themselves moved to Saaz during Eduard's childhood. By 1930 only 13 people of the Jewish faith were living in Deutsch Rust. The names of the community's rabbis, teachers, cantors and lay leaders have not been found in the sources consulted, nor is it known when the congregation ceased to hold regular services.
Architecture and design
The synagogue was completed in 1816, according to Jüdische Gemeinden. Nothing else about the building is documented in the sources read for this entry. No photograph, drawing, plan or written description has been found, so its size, building material, plan, style, the arrangement of the women's section and the position of the Torah ark are all unknown, as are the architect and the builder. Its site within the village has not been identified either. A building of this date in a Bohemian village would usually have been a modest free-standing or semi-detached structure of rendered masonry, but without evidence nothing can be said about this particular synagogue. A historical photograph of the building may exist in the Czech collection of vanished places and objects, Zaniklé obce a objekty (zanikleobce.cz), which often holds pictures of demolished village synagogues, but that site could not be read for this entry.
Life inside the synagogue
Very little is recorded about religious life in the Deutsch Rust synagogue. It served a village congregation that, at its height in the 1860s, numbered about 290 people, large enough to sustain regular services and to maintain its own burial ground. That cemetery lies well outside the village, about half a kilometre to the south-east, and has a ceremonial house for the preparation of the dead; its surviving stones date from the second half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Before the cemetery was established, the community buried its dead at Maschau (Mašťov). Nothing has been found about a religious school, a ritual bath, a rabbi's or teacher's residence, or the officers of the congregation. With only 13 Jews in the village by 1930, it is unlikely that a prayer quorum could still be gathered regularly in the synagogue's last years, but no source says when services ended.
Destruction
No source consulted records what happened to the synagogue of Deutsch Rust during the Nazi period. In the autumn of 1938 the region of Saaz was annexed to Nazi Germany under the Munich Agreement, and in the pogrom of November 1938 the synagogue in nearby Saaz was set on fire and partly destroyed; whether the village synagogue was attacked is not known. The building survived the war and stood empty in a village whose population fell from 712 in 1921 to 234 in 1950. According to Jüdische Gemeinden the synagogue building was demolished in 1957, under Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. The source does not say who ordered or carried out the demolition, whether the building had first been sold, or what it had been used for after the war, and none of these questions could be answered from the other sources read.
The community’s fate
By 1930 only 13 Jews lived in Deutsch Rust. After the Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938 the Sudeten border regions, including the Saaz area, were annexed by Nazi Germany. Holocaust.cz estimates that at least 12,000 of the roughly 28,000 Jews of these regions left before 9 November 1938, most of them for the Czech interior; Jüdische Gemeinden says most Jews of Saaz had fled even before the annexation. In the November pogrom about 35 synagogues in the border regions were burned or damaged, Jewish men were sent to Dachau and Sachsenhausen, and the remaining communities ceased to function. Most of the Jews who had fled into the Bohemian interior were later deported by the Nazis to ghettos and concentration camps. What became of the last 13 Jews of Deutsch Rust individually, and how many of them were murdered, is unknown; no victim from the village was identified in this research. No Jewish community existed in the village after the war.
The site today
The exact plot on which the synagogue stood has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not known what occupies it today. The map pin for this entry marks the centre of Podbořanský Rohozec and should not be read as the synagogue's location. The village now has only about 160 inhabitants. The Jewish cemetery survives about half a kilometre south-east of the village: it is walled, covers about 1,500 square metres, is protected as a monument and is owned by the Jewish Community of Ústí nad Labem, but only a few gravestones and fragments remain, and it suffers from weather, vegetation and vandalism. Locating the synagogue plot will need the Stable Cadastre map of the 1840s or local records.
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