Old Synagogue of Siófok

The Jewish community

Jews appear in Siófok from the 1820s: in 1825 the Veszprém Chapter leased the village shop to a Jew named Schrenk, and in 1828 the leaseholder Mátyás Muth settled there; his five sons formed the core of the later congregation. After the Southern Railway reached the town in the early 1860s Siófok became the trading centre of the district and Jewish families arrived quickly, about thirty by 1868. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon records an independent community from 1862, within the rabbinical district of Balatonfőkajár, with a burial society from 1863 and a Hungarian-language school; Matyikó's research puts the formal founding in 1875. The congregation was Neolog (Congress). Pinkas Hakehillot counts 578 Jews in 1886 and 287 in 1930, and the Lexikon 360 members in 109 families in the late 1920s: merchants, artisans, doctors and hoteliers who helped turn Siófok into a fashionable resort. Márk Handler, later rabbi of Tata, served here before 1866. In August 1919 Siófok was the headquarters of Horthy's National Army, and Pinkas Hakehillot records the murder of Jews brought there during the White Terror.

Architecture and design

The architect is not known. Anikó Gazda's survey of Hungarian synagogues (1989) gives the external dimensions as 10.80 by 18.70 metres, the interior as 9.48 by 13.37 metres and the height of the cornice as 8.60 metres. The main façade was in a late-Romantic idiom: three bays wide, framed by hexagonal corner pillars rising to pointed finials, with round-arched openings on two levels and a circular window in the gable, over which stood the twin Tablets of the Law. The side elevations were articulated by pilasters with capitals, with four tall round-arched windows between them. The building was not ostentatiously large, though it rose above the neighbouring single-storey houses, and an ornate iron fence on a masonry base closed its forecourt from the street. Inside, a gallery carried on slender columns ran round three sides of the hall; a pre-war postcard shows panelled gallery fronts, painted walls, rows of pews and the ark set against the end wall beneath a round window. After 1945 the ark wall was repainted with a large Star of David.

Life inside the synagogue

The congregation followed the Neolog rite. The Lexikon and Matyikó name Mór Dessauer as its first rabbi and the merchant Ignác Fleischmann as its first president; Farkas Grosz was rabbi in the inter-war years, and Dr Tibor Fábián followed him until the deportations. Former residents told Matyikó that roughly a third of the members kept kosher, and that on the Day of Atonement even the Christian shops in Siófok closed. The parish priest Imre Wohlmuth was remembered walking arm in arm with Rabbi Grosz, conversing in Hebrew. From about 1910 sermons were arranged for the many Jewish summer visitors, and the pupils of the adjoining school were photographed in the synagogue yard in 1939. After the war the surviving teacher Ferenc Dorogi led the services, and scholars holidaying at Balatonfüred, among them Sándor Scheiber, came over for the festivals. A martyrs' memorial service was held from 1955, the last of them on 30 July 1978, and the last wedding, of Flóra Rothschild and Stefan Tree, took place on 7 September 1976.

Destruction

The synagogue outlived the Holocaust. Stripped and used as a warehouse in 1944, it was repaired by the survivors and used again, but emigration reduced the congregation to a handful, and after the 1970s the building was left empty. A photograph taken by Anikó Gazda in 1983 shows it still standing beside the modern post office, its plaster peeling and its windows broken. Around 1985 the Communists demolished it. Siófok's redevelopment plan called for the side street to be realigned and the post office on the corner to be enlarged; the town's Communist leadership and the state postal service, Magyar Posta, reached an agreement with the leadership of the Jewish community in 1985–86, bought part of the plot and cleared the old building for a new central post office. In return the postal service paid for a small new prayer house on the remaining land, designed in 1985 by Sándor Kovács of the Postal Design Institute. The exact date of the demolition is not given in the sources consulted; the town's own website says only that it happened in the 1980s.

The community’s fate

About 500 to 550 Jews lived in Siófok and its district on the eve of the war. Men were called up for forced labour from 1940. After the German occupation of March 1944 Nazi German forces closed the school, knocked down the Tablets of the Law and turned the synagogue into a store. On 29 April, 78 people were taken away 'for political reasons', most of them to Mauthausen. The rest were made to wear the yellow star, moved in May to the Komakút barracks ghetto in Veszprém, and at the end of June loaded onto trains by the Hungarian gendarmerie and deported by way of Sárvár to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Veszprém county records list 197 deportees from Siófok and about 80 from neighbouring Balatonújhely and Balatonkiliti; the retired rabbi Farkas Grosz and his wife were among those murdered. Matyikó counts some 490 persecuted, of whom 72 came back. Pinkas Hakehillot gives 97 Jews in 1946 and 36 in 1959; many emigrated, some after 1956.

The site today

The enlarged main post office of Siófok (Fő utca 186–188) now covers the corner of Fő utca and Széchenyi utca where the old synagogue stood. One plot further along, at Széchenyi utca 4, on the site of the former Jewish school, stands the small synagogue designed by Sándor Kovács and inaugurated on 12 June 1986, the first synagogue built in Hungary after 1945. It is used in summer for Friday-evening services and has a Holocaust memorial in its yard. Nothing of the old building remains in place; two small objects from it, mounted in 1986 as a keepsake, are in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives in Budapest, which also holds photographs of the building.

Notable names