Sečovce Synagogue

The Jewish community

Jews are recorded around Sečovce from the early eighteenth century; a gravestone of 1711 was found in the old cemetery, and the census of 1736 lists one Jewish family. By 1820 about 60 families lived in the town. They had a prayer house by 1810, a cemetery from 1811 and an independent community from 1816, led for forty years by Rabbi Meir Kahana. Many Hasidic Jews from Galicia settled there in the later nineteenth century, and a dispute in 1884 between them and the liberal-leaning community president Ignatz Wirtschafter was settled by Rabbi Reinitz. The town had 1,026 Jews in 1919 and 1,138 in 1940. Jews dominated local trade: grain merchants such as the Wirtschafter and Hershkovicz families, the Schwarcz timber business, the Neuman wine trade and the Birnbaum distillery and printing house. Both local banks were Jewish-owned, and most of the town's lawyers and both its doctors were Jews. Between the wars the community counted around 250 families and ran a school, a yeshiva, a Talmud Torah and several charities; Zionist groups were strong, and Zeev Jabotinsky spoke in the town in 1934.

Architecture and design

The synagogue was a two-storey rectangular hall, 22 metres long and 15 metres wide, under a hipped roof covered with sheet metal. Martina Diheneščíková calls its style Classicist and Moorish; because the congregation was strictly Orthodox it had no towers. The entrance front faced west. A large round-arched doorway, used only by men, had above it a round window with stained glass forming a Star of David, and the front ended in a parapet with relief decoration and stone Tablets of the Law inscribed in Hebrew. A 1910 postcard captioned 'Isr. Tempel' shows this front as a central projection with a stepped gable, flanked by narrower bays with paired windows, and a long side wall with tall arched windows. Women entered by side doors on the north and south and climbed two spiral stairs to a gallery on three sides, carried on six ornamental cast-iron columns. The vestibule, heated and floored in wood, served as a weekday prayer room. Inside, the walls and floor bore geometric oriental ornament and the blue ceiling was painted with gold stars. The ark stood on the east wall behind a wrought-iron rail, with the bimah raised in the centre. The architect is unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

The synagogue was built under Rabbi Yehoshua Baruch Reinitz, the community's most celebrated rabbi, who had led it since the 1870s, founded its yeshiva and in his last years revised the community statutes. Hasidic members, many of Galician origin, tended to pray and study in the separate study hall rather than in the synagogue. Reinitz was followed by Rabbi Aharon Kraus (1913-1922), noted for preaching in German and Slovak, and in 1924 by Rabbi Shmuel Menachem Klein, a Zionist, who died the following year. No new rabbi was appointed after him; the dayan Zalman Leib Adelis served as substitute rabbi and headed the yeshiva until it closed in 1932. On the eve of the Second World War Chaim Hecht and Aharon Kohn were the cantors and ritual slaughterers. The complex around the synagogue was the centre of religious education: the community school opened in 1903 with Hungarian, later Slovak and Hungarian, as its languages, and had 156 pupils in 1928 under its long-serving principal Jozef Blau; a Talmud Torah founded in 1888 stood beside it, where Rabbi Chaim Weinberger taught. A large modern mikveh was part of the synagogue building.

Destruction

No source records serious war damage to the synagogue itself, although the study hall was burned down and the old cemetery destroyed during the war. A local history says the synagogue and school were left damaged and abandoned, their furnishings, ritual objects and books lost or stolen. Survivors repaired the building and used it again for worship, for two or three years according to the local historian Peter Sklenčár, or until the community dissolved at the end of the 1960s according to Pinkas Hakehillot. It then stood empty and was used as a store for grain and for goods of a hardware shop, while the school building was nationalised and used by state schools. In 1972 the Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities handed the synagogue to the state so that a museum could be set up in it. Despite this agreement, the synagogue, the school and the neighbouring buildings were demolished in 1976, under Communist rule. The sources do not say which authority ordered or carried out the demolition. Borský also records the mikveh as demolished after the war.

The community’s fate

Under the Slovak State the Jews of Sečovce were pushed out of public schools and at least 40 Jewish businesses were aryanized in 1940-1941. Deportations by the Slovak authorities began at the end of March 1942: young men were sent via Žilina to Majdanek, and young women via Poprad to Auschwitz on 2 April; 75 young women escaped and hid. On 2 May 1942 about 300 Jews of Sečovce and 250 from nearby villages were held in Jonah Hershkovicz's grain warehouse, taken to the barracks in Trebišov and deported on 5 May to the Lublin district, the men to Majdanek and the others to the Lubartów ghetto. Small groups followed until autumn, among them the dayan Zalman Adelis and the district rabbi Menachem Gershon Moskovic. About 85 per cent of the community was deported in 1942; 150 people remained in 1943, and in May 1944 most of them left for western Slovakia. More than 700 Jews of Sečovce were killed. About 20 fought with the Slovak partisans and five fell. After liberation about 100 Jews gathered in the town; 98 lived there in 1948 and 60 in 1950, after emigration to Israel.

The site today

Nothing of the synagogue survives. According to the local historian Peter Sklenčár, as summarised by Martina Diheneščíková, the site of the synagogue is now an open park area, and an access road to the town's first seven-storey block of flats, connected to P. O. Hviezdoslava Street, was built across the site of the Jewish school. The Slovak gazetteer Pamiatky na Slovensku places the synagogue near today's bus station. Borský describes the place as an empty space beside a Communist-era housing estate. The newer Jewish cemetery of Sečovce survives and is maintained; the old cemetery was destroyed during the war. A second prayer house, on Blatná Street, stood until 2005 according to the community's KehilaLinks site. The exact plot of the synagogue has not been fixed from a cadastral map in this research.

Notable names