Rozhanovce Synagogue

OVERVIEW

The story of Rozhanovce Synagogue

Rozhanovce, called Rozgony in Hungarian, lies in the Košice-okolie district a short distance north-east of Košice. Until the 1840s Košice did not allow Jews to settle within its walls, so Jews who did business at the city markets lived in nearby villages and travelled in. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, as reproduced by the Jewish Virtual Library, dates the Jewish settlement in Rozhanovce to 1765, and the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 says that most of the Jews visiting the Košice markets lived in Rozgony. Maroš Borský describes Rozhanovce and Veľká Ida as traditional countryside kehillot that kept their own communal institutions, and the Slovak Wikipedia calls the village a ghetto for the Jews of Košice with its own rabbinate.

Elek Fényes's geographical dictionary of 1851 lists 230 Jews in the village and a synagogue. Once Košice opened to Jews in the 1840s most of them moved into the city, and the Rozhanovce community dwindled. Borský records in a single sentence that the synagogue of Rozhanovce burned in 1930; he gives no further detail. No photograph, plan or description of the building has been found, so its date of construction, size and appearance are unknown, and it is not certain that the building of 1851 was the one that burned.

LOCATION

Where it stood

Historic: Rozgony, Abaúj-Torna county; street and plot unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of Rozhanovce, okres Košice-okolie, 044 42 (approximate).

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The Jewish community

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on Košice, Jews doing business in Košice settled in Rozhanovce in 1765. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon states that most of the Jews who came to the Košice markets lived in Rozgony and that most of the later Jewish settlers of Košice came from among the people of Rozgony. Borský counts Rozhanovce, with Veľká Ida, among the main Jewish settlements on the outskirts of the free royal towns of eastern Slovakia and gives its Jewish population as 230 in 1840; Fényes gives the same figure in 1851, out of a total of about 1,370 inhabitants. The community had a burial society: fragments of its Chevra Kadisha book, with entries of 1837, 1879, 1882 and 1897, are held by the Jewish Museum in Prešov. When Košice opened to Jews, the Encyclopaedia Judaica says, the Jews of Rozhanovce moved there in 1840-42, and Borský writes that the first rabbi of the new Košice community, Marton Kohn, came from Rozhanovce. By 1941 only 31 Jews remained in the village.

Architecture and design

Nothing is known of the building's architecture. No photograph, drawing, plan or written description of the Rozhanovce synagogue was found in this research, and Borský's survey of Slovak synagogue architecture, which mentions it only once, does not describe it. Fényes's dictionary of 1851 confirms that a synagogue existed in the village by then but says nothing of its form or materials. The nearest comparison is the surviving synagogue of the twin community at Veľká Ida, which Borský uses as evidence of how an early nineteenth-century countryside synagogue in this area looked: a simple building under a saddleback roof. Whether the Rozhanovce building was similar, whether it was of timber or masonry, and who built it are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

Very little is recorded of religious life in the Rozhanovce synagogue. Borský calls the community a traditional countryside kehilla that maintained Jewish communal institutions, and the Slovak Wikipedia says the village had a rabbinate serving the Jews of Košice, who were not allowed to settle in the city until about 1840. The congregation therefore served not only the villagers but the Jewish traders of the regional capital, who worshipped, married and buried their dead here. The surviving fragments of the Chevra Kadisha book, decorated with watercolour and calligraphy and dated between 1837 and 1897, show that the burial society kept its records into the late nineteenth century, long after most members had moved to Košice. The names of the rabbis who served in the synagogue, other than the link to Marton Kohn, were not found.

Destruction

The only account of the synagogue's end is one sentence in Maroš Borský's Synagogue Architecture in Slovakia (2005): 'the synagogue of Rozhanovce burned in 1930'. At that date the village lay in Czechoslovakia and the community was already small, so the loss came well before the Second World War and is not connected in any source to antisemitic violence. Borský does not say what caused the fire, whether it was accidental, whether the building was in use or already abandoned, or whether anything was salvaged. No newspaper report, municipal record or community document of the fire was found. Nothing suggests the synagogue was rebuilt afterwards, and with only a few dozen Jews left in the village, the community probably had neither the need nor the means to replace it.

The community’s fate

The Jewish community of Rozhanovce had been shrinking since the 1840s, when most of its members moved into Košice; the Encyclopaedia Judaica says the Jews of Rozhanovce settled in the city in 1840-42 and built up its community life. Borský attributes the continued decline to urbanisation and gives a fall from 230 Jews in 1840 to 31 in 1941. What happened to those 31 people during the Holocaust is not recorded in any source read for this entry: whether they were deported in 1942 or 1944, how many were murdered and whether any returned is unknown. No Jewish community existed in Rozhanovce after the war. The Jewish cemetery, shown on Austro-Hungarian maps of the 1860s and 1880s, survives in an overgrown state south-east of the village with a handful of twentieth-century stones.

The site today

The site of the synagogue has not been identified. No source consulted gives its street or plot, and no remains or marker are recorded. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of the municipality of Rozhanovce and should not be read as the synagogue's location. The one physical trace of the community in the village is its Jewish cemetery, about 600 metres south-east of the end of Družstevná Street, which the European Jewish cemetery survey found overgrown and unfenced, with between one and twenty Hebrew-inscribed stones reported but not located. Older cadastral maps or the Pinkas Hakehillot entry may reveal where the synagogue stood.

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