First Synagogue of Sečovce

The Jewish community

The town's archives first record a Jewish family, named Olblat, in a list of residents from 1764, and the Brown, Pulitzer and Kleinman families are remembered as founders of the community. Settlement depended on the consent of the local estate owners. By 1880 Sečovce had 1,015 Jews among 3,134 inhabitants, and Borský lists it among the Slovak communities of 500 to 1,000 members at that time; KehilaLinks gives 1,026 Jews in 1919 and 1,138 in 1940. After the Hungarian Jewish congress of 1868-1869 the community registered as Orthodox, with a Hasidic group and a smaller group of the more modern-minded. Many Jews kept shops and traded at the town's weekly markets, where farmers from the surrounding vineyard and farming villages sold their produce. Under Rabbi Reinitz, chief rabbi from 1870 to 1912, Sečovce became one of the strongest communities in Zemplín county, and his authority reached the Jews of 28 surrounding villages.

Architecture and design

No photograph, drawing or description of the building's appearance is known. The Slovak gazetteer Pamiatky na Slovensku, drawing on Peter Sklenčár's local history Zabudnuté Sečovce (2017), states plainly that its form has not been preserved and that it survives only in the records of the cadastral map of 1886. A detail of that map, reproduced by KehilaLinks from Sklenčár's book, shows the synagogue as a single rectangular block coloured red, set on a narrow plot between the Trnávka stream and a mill race, with a long pink-coloured building, probably part of the same complex, close by. Pamiatky na Slovensku says the complex included ritual baths, a teaching room and the rabbi's apartment. The building's size, materials, seating, style, interior and architect are all unknown. The map shows only its footprint and setting in the town's south-western quarter, among the long strip plots of the houses beside the stream.

Life inside the synagogue

The congregation that prayed here was Orthodox. The Pinkas Hakehillot names Meir Kahana (1816-1856), Nathan Spira (1857-1858) and Josef Grünwald (died 1870) as the earlier rabbis, so the building opened under Rabbi Joshua Baruch Reinitz, who led the community from 1870 (KehilaLinks) or 1875 (Pinkas). He founded a large yeshiva, revived the burial society, founded the Talmud Torah Society in 1895 and later introduced a revised community statute. In 1884 a dispute between the Orthodox majority and more modern members led to separate prayer services under a joint committee, and a Talmud Torah school opened that year. The synagogue complex on Hodvábna Street also held the ritual baths, a classroom and the rabbi's home, so religious teaching and daily ritual were concentrated on the one plot by the stream. A Jewish elementary school funded by Dr. Mór Friedmann opened in 1903.

Destruction

The first synagogue burnt down twice, despite standing between two watercourses. The Pinkas Hakehillot (Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities, Slovakia) says that the Great Synagogue and the beit midrash were destroyed by fire twice during Rabbi Reinitz's tenure, which it dates from 1875, and that each time they were rebuilt with donations from the community. The ANU Museum of the Jewish People states that a fire in 1904 destroyed the synagogue, the prayer house and the school, and that the synagogue and prayer house had been lost to fire once before. KehilaLinks dates a fire at a prayer house on Bačkovská Street to 1895, but does not link it to the Hodvábna Street building. After the fires the community did not rebuild on the old plot and put up a new synagogue elsewhere, completed in 1904. The causes of the fires are not recorded, and no source suggests arson.

The community’s fate

The congregation moved to the new synagogue of 1904, which served until the Holocaust. In 1940 Sečovce had 1,138 Jewish residents, about a quarter of the town. Under the Slovak State, a client of Nazi Germany, Jews were pushed out of economic life and Jewish men were sent to labour units. Deportations from Slovakia began in late March 1942: on 2 April Jewish girls and young women from Sečovce were sent to Auschwitz, and on 5 May about 300 Jews of the town and 250 from nearby villages were deported to ghettos and death camps in the Lublin district of Poland, where they were murdered. KehilaLinks puts the total deported from the district at 1,040, most of them from Sečovce, and says virtually all perished. Some who remained joined the partisans in 1944. The Red Army reached the town on 2 December 1944. About 30 families returned and used the new synagogue until 1949, but most emigrated, and by the 1950s no Jews remained.

The site today

The site lies at the southern end of Hodvábna Street, just west of the street and south of its junction with Hrnčiarska Street, on the north bank of the Trnávka stream. A modern location sketch published by KehilaLinks after Sklenčár marks the synagogue there and the rabbi's apartment, classroom and ritual bath on the plot next to it, closer to the stream. No remains of the building are recorded and no marker is known on the site. The later synagogue of 1904, near today's bus station, was demolished in 1976. The town's Jewish cemetery survives and holds the grave of Rabbi Reinitz.

Notable names