The story of Slabce Synagogue
Slabce is a small market town about 11 km south of Rakovník in Central Bohemia. For a long time the Jews of this rural area had their religious centre in the neighbouring village of Svinařov, where Jiří Fiedler records a prayer room from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, and where the community's cemetery lies just over the boundary in the cadastre of Rousínov. According to the survey of that cemetery made by Ladislav Mertl and Jiří Fiedler in 1992, the Svinařov prayer house was destroyed by fire in 1866, and the seat of the congregation then moved to Slabce. Fiedler's gazetteer of Jewish monuments in Bohemia and Moravia records that a synagogue was built at Slabce in 1867-68, and the municipality's own website says that Slabce took over Svinařov's role as the centre of the local Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The new congregation also kept a German-language Jewish school, which it closed of its own accord in 1893. Two photographs held by the municipality show the synagogue: one from the early twentieth century, when it was a well-kept gabled hall with a Star of David on its front, and one from the 1960s, captioned as taken before its demolition, when it was altered and visibly decaying. Fiedler records that the building was pulled down after 1970.
Where it stood for 102 years
Historic: Slabce, Rakovník district, Bohemia; street and house number unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of the market town of Slabce, 270 41, Rakovník district, Central Bohemian Region (approximate).
Open larger map →The Jewish community
The earliest known record of a Jewish community in this part of the Rakovník region dates from 1786, according to the JewishGen cemetery survey. Its first centre was Svinařov, about 3 km from Slabce, where Fiedler notes a prayer room in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cemetery that served both villages lies about 1 km north-west of Svinařov on the cadastre of Rousínov; the municipality of Slabce dates its foundation to about 1830, Fiedler gives 1858, and the last legible gravestones are from 1928. After the fire of 1866 the congregation moved its seat to Slabce, which in the second half of the nineteenth century became the religious centre for the Jews of the surrounding villages. A history of the Jews of the Slabce area by Jan Renner and Josef Fišer, 'Dějiny židů na Slabecku', was published in the bulletin of the Rakovník museum society in 1936 but could not be read for this entry, so the size of the congregation at its height, its officers and the names of its families are unknown.
Architecture and design
The early twentieth-century photograph shows a free-standing rendered building seen straight on from the street, in winter, behind a low picket fence with a gate between stone piers. The entrance front is divided into three bays. The taller central bay ends in a triangular gable bearing a Star of David, with a small round-arched window below it and a finial with a weather vane at the apex. The lower side bays, framed by pilaster strips and finished with a cornice, each have one tall round-arched window with glazing bars. The central bay has a larger round-arched window with tracery and, beneath it, a round-arched doorway, and recessed cross-shaped panels decorate the lower wall on either side. No source names the architect, the builder, the style or the seating capacity, and no plan or interior view was found; the description of the style as round-arched is taken from the photograph. The 1960s photograph shows the same gabled front with rectangular openings in place of the arched windows, a chimney and a street lamp fixed to the wall.
Life inside the synagogue
Very little is recorded about religious life in the Slabce synagogue. It served as the seat of the regional congregation that had earlier worshipped in the prayer house at Svinařov, and the dead of the congregation were buried in the cemetery near Svinařov on the Rousínov cadastre. Alongside the synagogue the congregation maintained a Jewish school teaching in German. On 23 September 1893 the Catholic newspaper Čech reported that the Jewish religious community of Slabce had voluntarily closed this school and that Jewish children now attended the five-class municipal school of Slabce. No rabbi, cantor, teacher or community president of Slabce has been identified in the sources consulted, and no description of the interior, the Torah ark or the furnishings survives in them. What happened to the ritual objects when services ended is also unknown.
Destruction
No source consulted says what happened to the synagogue during the Second World War or when regular services ended. It survived the war: a photograph kept by the municipality of Slabce and dated to the 1960s, captioned 'synagogue before demolition', shows the building still standing but altered and neglected, with its round-arched windows replaced by rectangular openings, cracked and missing render, a chimney added and rubble lying in front. The alterations suggest it had been put to some other use, but no source says what that use was or who owned the building after 1945. Jiří Fiedler, who surveyed Jewish sites in the district before 1992, records simply that the synagogue was demolished after 1970. The demolition therefore probably took place in the later years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, but no exact date has been found, and who ordered or carried out the demolition is not recorded.
The community’s fate
By 1930 only five Jews lived in Slabce and six in Svinařov, according to the census figures quoted in the 1992 cemetery survey. The decline matched that of the district as a whole: in Rakovník, the district town, the Jewish population fell from 329 in 1900 to 153 in 1930, and Fiedler notes that the Rakovník congregation was not re-established after the Second World War. The fate of the last Jews of Slabce and Svinařov under the Nazi German occupation is not recorded in the sources read for this entry, which give neither their names nor whether they had left the village before 1939, and the database of Holocaust victims from the Czech lands was not searched. The 1992 survey found no Jews living in Svinařov, and no postwar Jewish community in Slabce is recorded.
The site today
No source consulted gives the address or plot number of the synagogue, so its exact site in Slabce cannot be identified, and what occupies it today is unknown. The 1960s photograph shows the building set in a row along a street, with a gabled house adjoining on the right and a brick gate pier and fence in front. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Slabce and should not be read as the synagogue's location. The congregation's cemetery near Svinařov, on the Rousínov cadastre, survives and is owned by the Jewish Community of Prague; a restoration of the cemetery was reported in May 2018. Locating the plot will need the cadastral maps of Slabce or Renner and Fišer's history of 1936.
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Photographs, documents, family stories or memories of this synagogue and its community help keep its history alive.
- Rakovník (with nearby Jewish communities), in Jiří Fiedler, Židovské památky v Čechách a na Moravě
- Historické (historical photographs of Slabce)
- Památky (monuments of Slabce and its parts)
- Čtení o Slabcích: Zrušení židovské školy
- Svinařov (Rousínov) Jewish cemetery, Rakovník, Bohemia
- Slabce (OpenStreetMap relation 440769)
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