Pohořelice Synagogue

The Jewish community

Jews are documented in Pohořelice from 1490, and the de.wikipedia town history says a significant Jewish community took shape in the late sixteenth century. The Thirty Years' War hit Jews and Christians alike, leaving more than half the houses empty. In 1673 there were about 21 Jewish households. The eighteenth century brought rapid growth: around 1790 about 450 Jews lived in the town, roughly 34 per cent of its people, earning their living mainly from trade and moneylending. The Jewish and Christian parts of the town were administered separately but cooperated; the town history notes that of the two night watchmen one was a Jew and one a Christian. From about 1849, officially from 1862, the Jewish quarter formed its own political municipality, whose head also served as mayor, until it was merged with the Christian town in 1919. Children were taught by private tutors until 1835, then in a community school, and a German-language Jewish elementary school ran from 1847 until about 1918-20. Numbers fell from about 770 in 1857 to 498 in 1900 and about 235 to 277 around 1930. The Zionist writer and publisher Berthold Feiwel was born here in 1875.

Architecture and design

Very little is known about the building itself. The sources consulted agree only that it was the community's second synagogue, built to replace an older one that had become too small for the growing congregation, that construction took place in 1854-55, and that it was consecrated in 1856. No architect, builder, plan, description of the interior, seating figure or photograph of the synagogue was found in this research, so its size, style and appearance remain unknown. It was built at a time when Moravian communities were rebuilding their synagogues in larger and more representative form after the reforms of 1848-49, and when Pohořelice had the largest Jewish population in its history, about 770 people in 1857; that suggests a sizeable hall, but no source states its dimensions. An earlier synagogue is recorded as destroyed in a great fire in the year after the French occupation of 1805, which burned 93 houses; whether the old synagogue replaced in the 1850s was a rebuilding of that one is not stated. The building's street and plot are not given in any source read.

Life inside the synagogue

No account of services in the 1856 synagogue was found. The only person the sources tie directly to the building is Rabbi Dr. A. Schmiedl of Prostějov, who consecrated it in 1856. The congregation followed the pattern of the larger Moravian communities: it had its own rabbinate, its own school, and, until 1919, its own political municipality, so the synagogue stood at the centre of a self-governing Jewish town within Pohořelice. Its members kept a memorial book, the Pohrlitzer Memorbuch, which Heinrich Flesch described in 1928; such books recorded the names of the dead and of benefactors to be read aloud in the synagogue. The cemetery, laid out in the late seventeenth century, has graves from 1676 onwards. The names of the community's later rabbis, cantors and presidents, and whether the congregation was traditional or reform in its worship, are not given in the sources read for this entry. Hugo Gold's 1929 history of the Jews of Moravia, which has a chapter on Pohrlitz, would probably supply them.

Destruction

In October 1938, after the Munich Agreement, Pohořelice was annexed to Nazi Germany and placed in the Reichsgau Niederdonau. According to the German Wikipedia history of the town, in the same year the Nazis drove out many Czechs and the Jews, and the synagogue was released for demolition. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that the synagogue built in 1854-55 was demolished by the Nazis, and the Jüdische Gemeinden site says it was partly destroyed during the German occupation, while the cemetery was badly desecrated. The sources do not agree on whether the building was pulled down completely during the war or only wrecked, nor do they give the date of demolition or name the authority or firm that carried it out. No source records the building standing after 1945. What is certain is that by the time the sources were written nothing remained of it and the site had become open ground.

The community’s fate

Many Jews left Pohořelice after the annexation in October 1938, when the Nazis drove the Jewish population out of the town; around 1930 the community had numbered between 235 and 277 people. Those who fled into the remaining Czech lands came under Nazi rule again in March 1939. Most of the Jews of Pohořelice who did not emigrate were deported during the Second World War, and the majority were murdered in the Shoah; the sources read give no transport dates or victim numbers for the town. In 1944-45 the Nazis ran a transit camp in Pohořelice for Jewish prisoners from Hungary, from which they were sent on to Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen. No Jewish community was re-established after the war. The cemetery, which had been devastated, was restored after 1945 and is now the only clear trace of the community.

The site today

The Jüdische Gemeinden site states that where the synagogue once stood there is now an open space. None of the sources read gives the street or plot, so the exact place could not be identified, and the map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Pohořelice, not the synagogue's location. The Jewish cemetery survives with about 250 headstones, the oldest from 1676, and was restored after the war. Locating the site will need the historic cadastral map of the Jewish quarter or Jiří Fiedler's survey of Jewish sights in Bohemia and Moravia.

Notable names