Rimavská Sobota Synagogue

La comunidad judía

A ban on Jewish settlement in Gemer-Malohont county kept Jews out of Rimavská Sobota until the revolution of 1848. The earliest written mention of a community dates from 1851, when an estimated 300 to 400 Jews lived in the town, and the later emancipation law opened public life to them. Borský's census figures give 345 Jews in Rimavská Sobota in 1880, and he counts it later among the Slovak communities of 500 to 1,000 members. A wartime town archive records about 636 Jews, some nine per cent of the population, before the deportations. The community founded associations and a Jewish elementary school, which stood beside the synagogue and taught until the Second World War. Its first elected rabbi, Abrahám M. Friedmann, was also county rabbi. The congregation followed the Neolog rite, the modernising branch of Hungarian Jewry. Whether a separate Orthodox congregation with its own prayer house existed in the town is not recorded in the sources read.

Arquitectura y diseño

The synagogue was a one-storey, free-standing building with a footprint of about 18 by 14 metres. Its plot had its eastern side to the street, so the street front was the east wall, the one containing the Torah ark. Borský describes the ark as a protrusion marked by a monumental niche with a round window, flanked on each side by small round-arched windows. Two slender polygonal corner minarets with onion-shaped roofs, each topped by a Shield of David, dominated the exterior; the local account calls them towers. The round neo-Romanesque window held a coloured rose, and marble Tablets of the Law were set in the centre of the façade. The style mixed historicist detail with Moorish motifs, as a local article puts it. Inside, the sanctuary was a plain hall with a women's gallery on cast-iron columns along three sides. Photographs show the ark framed by two columns under an arched crest with a Star of David, the gallery's ornamental iron railings and tall arched windows along the side walls. The architect and the seating capacity are unknown.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

The synagogue was the centre of a Neolog congregation, which in Hungary meant a modernising community that accepted features the Orthodox rejected, such as towers on the synagogue. Little else about worship in the building is recorded in the sources read. The community's first elected rabbi, Abrahám M. Friedmann, also held the office of county rabbi, so his authority reached beyond the town into the surrounding county. Next to it stood the community's elementary school and its communal house, so the plot formed a small Jewish quarter of its own at the edge of the town centre. After the war the surviving members kept up services for more than two decades in a building that was too large for them. The last service, according to the community's postwar chairman Dušan Rybár, was held at Hanukkah in 1969. Interior photographs taken later show the ark and the women's gallery still in place, with benches, among fallen debris.

Destrucción

The building came through the Second World War standing. After the last services in 1969 it was left empty and decayed; photographs held by the Gemer-Malohont Museum show cracked and peeling plaster, broken windows and vegetation pressing against the walls. The Local National Committee of Rimavská Sobota, the Communist town authority of the time, then decided to demolish the synagogue together with the original Jewish school building, giving the poor state of the structure as the reason. According to Dušan Rybár, chairman of the Jewish community, the state had refused to pay for repairs. The Communist town authority had the synagogue pulled down in December 1986. Which firm carried out the work is not recorded. Before demolition the marble Tablets of the Law were removed from the façade; they are now in the Gemer-Malohont Museum. Borský also gives 1986. The Hungarian Wikipedia article on the town gives 1988, citing a 2005 newspaper article, but the more detailed local sources agree on December 1986.

El destino de la comunidad

Rimavská Sobota then lay within Hungary, and its Jews shared the fate of Hungarian Jewry after the Nazi German occupation of the country on 19 March 1944. A survivor interviewed by Centropa, Tibor Engel, recalled that the town's Jews were gathered into two ghettos, one in the former high school and one in a farmyard on the edge of town; a local article speaks of three collection points, on Tomašova and Bartókova streets and in the lyceum building. From there they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The records of the wartime town administration, now in the State Archive in Banská Bystrica, document the ghettoisation and deportation, the guardians appointed for the deportees' houses and the Aryanisation of their real estate and valuables between June and December 1944. A local account gives 726 people taken from the town and nearby villages. Most were murdered. Of a community of about a thousand, roughly 86 people returned after the war. The Soviet Army took the town on 21 December 1944. Two marble tablets in the Jewish cemetery list 1,036 victims.

El lugar hoy

The synagogue stood at the corner of what were Kossúthova and Lučenecká streets, now Hatvaniho and Cukrovarská streets, beside the Evangelical church in the centre of Rimavská Sobota. Both the synagogue and the neighbouring Jewish school were cleared in 1986, and no building of the Jewish community remains on the plot. A Holocaust memorial was unveiled on the site in 2005. Nothing of the synagogue itself remains in place; the marble Tablets of the Law from its façade are kept in the Gemer-Malohont Museum in the town. The Jewish cemetery, which holds memorial tablets with the names of the victims, is closed to the public because of theft.

Nombres destacados