Poděbrady Synagogue

RESUMEN

La historia de Poděbrady Synagogue

Poděbrady is a spa town on the Elbe in the Nymburk district of Central Bohemia. Jews were long excluded from it: according to the town archivist Jan Hellich they were expelled in 1628 and again in 1743, and the first protected Jew recorded in the town archives was the cloth merchant Josef Porias (Borias) in 1750. For generations most Jewish families of the estate lived in the surrounding villages, above all in Malé Zboží, where the community kept a prayer room in a courtyard. After Jews won equal rights in 1848 the Poděbrady Jews formed their own religious community. In 1852 a plot in the former Nymburk suburb was bought from the Kantor family for 801 gulden, and 25 members of the congregation signed the contract for building the synagogue. In 1871 the community bought the neighbouring house for a German-language school and a rabbi's flat. The congregation stayed small: 49 Jews lived in the town in 1930. The synagogue served until the Second World War. A file in the town archive records the town's purchase of the synagogue in 1948, and a plaque on the site gives 1959 as the end of the building. Who carried out the demolition is not recorded in the sources read.

UBICACIÓN

Where it stood for nearly 110 years

Historic: synagogue no. 17/I in the former Nymburk suburb of Poděbrady, beside the Jewish school no. 19/II. Today: park on Husova street opposite the Evangelical church, 290 01 Poděbrady (approximate within the park).

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La comunidad judía

Hellich's history of the Jews of Poděbrady, based on the town and estate archives, traces Jewish settlement on the Poděbrady estate from 1638, mostly as leaseholders of taxes and distilleries, tradesmen and distillers. Abraham Kantor leased the Poděbrady distillery until 1786, and a tavern and distillery at Malé Zboží from 1716 became a centre of Jewish life. The 1826 census found 36 Jews in eight families in the town itself among 2,768 inhabitants, and 307 Jews in 65 families across the whole estate. Hellich says the number in town grew quickly afterwards. After 1848 the Jews of the district organised three religious communities, at Poděbrady, Nymburk and Králové Městec. Leading families included the Borias, Kantor, Katz and Roubitschek families; Moritz Roubitschek came in 1850 to manage the Blata estate, and his son Theodor founded a distillery in 1877. Many families moved to larger cities in the later nineteenth century, and the 1930 census counted 49 Jews. Natives of the community included Julie Löwy, mother of Franz Kafka, the poets Franz Janowitz and Rudolf Fuchs, and the screenwriter Hans Janowitz.

Arquitectura y diseño

No photograph, drawing or plan of the synagogue was found, so its appearance is unknown. Hellich records only that the plot lay in the former Nymburk suburb, that the building carried the house number 17/I, and that an old house for the caretaker stood beside it. In 1871 the community bought the adjoining house, number 19/II, from Šimon Kantor and fitted it out as an Israelite school, taught in German, with a flat for the rabbi; Catholic children also attended to learn German, which made the school a matter of local controversy. The school and the synagogue therefore formed a small group of communal buildings on the street now called Husova, opposite the Evangelical church. The architect, builder, seating capacity, style and interior arrangement are all unknown. The town archive also holds a file of 1820 on permission to build a synagogue and Hellich mentions a garden by the Elbe bought by Borias in 1814 for a synagogue, which suggests an earlier building or project before 1852.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

Very little is recorded about worship in the building. The congregation followed the general pattern of small Bohemian Jewish communities after emancipation: a single synagogue serving a few dozen families, with a teacher and, at least for part of the period, a rabbi housed next door in the school building. No rabbi, cantor or teacher is named in the sources read. The German-language school opened in 1871; the plaque on the site gives 1897 as its last year, while Hellich writes that the German school was only abolished in 1910. Before 1898 the community buried its dead at Kovanice near Nymburk; in that year it opened its own cemetery at Kluk, beside the Catholic municipal cemetery, where a ceremonial hall designed by Josef Fanta was built around 1900. The archive file of 1869-1895 on the founding of the Jewish school and lists of Jews from 1827-1842 are among the records that may document the congregation's life in more detail.

Destrucción

No source read describes damage to the synagogue during the Nazi occupation, although the Jewish cemetery was devastated and all but one of its headstones removed during the war. The building stood empty after the deportations of 1942. The town archive of Poděbrady holds a file covering 1940 to 1950 with a proposal to demolish the synagogue and the Jewish school, and a separate file of 1948 on the town's purchase of a synagogue, linked to a Josef Wiener. The archival description does not say whether the proposal was carried out or by whom. The memorial plaque laid on the site states that the synagogue stood there from 1852 to 1959, which places its disappearance in the eleventh year of Communist rule, when the building was apparently in municipal ownership. No document of the demolition itself was found, and who ordered and carried it out is not recorded in the sources read.

El destino de la comunidad

After the Nazi German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, the Jews of Poděbrady were stripped of their flats, property and businesses; the district office files of 1938-1942 document these measures. The memorial board erected by the town names 216 Jewish citizens of Poděbrady who were deported between 1942 and 1944 to the Terezín ghetto and from there to Trawniki, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau and Riga, where most were murdered. The figure is far above the 49 Jews counted in the town in 1930 and probably includes Jews from the surrounding district or people who moved there. After 1945 a small synagogue congregation was restored under the Jewish Religious Community of Prague. It was made up mainly of residents of a Jewish old-age home set up in the former Luxor hotel, which had its own prayer room; many of them are buried in the Kluk cemetery. The congregation came to an end at the close of the 1960s.

El lugar hoy

The site lies on Husova street, opposite the Evangelical church, and is now a small public park with lawns, paths and shrubs. Nothing of the synagogue or the school is visible. A memorial board with the names of the deported Jews of Poděbrady and a plaque recording the synagogue and school stand on the site. The house numbers 17/I and 19/II given by Hellich have not been matched to the present plots, so the exact footprint of the building inside the park is not established. The Jewish cemetery at Kluk, about 1.5 km to the south-west on Pražská street, survives with about 90 headstones and plaques.

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