Diószeg Synagogue, Sládkovičovo

הקהילה היהודית

According to Lang, a Jew is first mentioned in Diószeg in 1728, but that presence was passing; tombstones show that Jews settled permanently only in the middle of the nineteenth century. The David Wollner family arrived in 1860, and David Wollner became the founder and first chairman of the Jewish religious community. He was succeeded by his son Géza, and the last chairman, until the deportations of 1944, was Armin Wohlstein. Lang's census table gives 147 Jews (6.6 per cent of the population) in 1880, 220 (7.34 per cent) in 1910, about 170 in 1930, of whom 76 declared Jewish nationality, and 110 (2.32 per cent) in 1941. Several figures in the table are given as ranges because different counts disagree. Lang's study, as its title says, also traces how the community's property was taken after the town was annexed to Hungary in 1938.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

Nothing is known of the building's architecture. Lang's study, the only source found that mentions the synagogue, says only that the community had one in the period before the First World War. It does not give the year of construction, the builder, the size, the materials or the arrangement of the interior, and it reproduces no photograph or plan of the synagogue among the slides that could be read. The building is not among the demolished synagogues described in Maroš Borský's survey of synagogue architecture in Slovakia, and no postcard or archive photograph of it was found in this run. Given that the community was a small rural Orthodox congregation of between about 110 and 220 people, it was most likely a modest free-standing prayer hall with a women's section, but that is an inference from the size of the community, not a documented fact. The capacity, architect and style are therefore all unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

Lang describes the congregation as run strictly according to the Orthodox rite and subordinate to the rabbinate of Galanta, the district town. Its first rabbi, in 1867, was Joel Margulius. Smaja Gutmann served as rabbinical assessor and dayan, the judge of the religious court. From the late nineteenth century the rabbi was Benjamin Wolf Kohn, and his successor was Hirsh Shalom Adler, whom Lang describes as the author of a dictionary of the ancient Hebrew language. Around the synagogue the community maintained a five-class primary school, employed a ritual slaughterer and supported charitable and youth associations, which suggests a full religious life in spite of the small numbers. The lay leadership remained in the hands of a few families, above all the Wollners, who founded the community and led it for two generations before Armin Wohlstein took over. Nothing more specific about services, cantors or the synagogue's furnishings was found in the sources read.

הרס

There are two accounts of how the synagogue disappeared, and the sources read do not allow a choice between them. Lang's footnote 49 states openly that information on the fate of the synagogue in Diószeg differs. The first version comes from a witness whom Lang interviewed. She said that the synagogue building was severely damaged by bombing aimed at the sugar mill and refinery, and that a detached house was built on the site of the synagogue as early as 1947; she spent her childhood in that house. Lang records two Allied air raids on Diószeg, on 6 December 1944 by eight B-24 bombers and on 15 January 1945 by a single B-24 dropping cluster bombs. The second version is in the Encyklopédia židovských náboženských obcí na Slovensku (2009, p. 59), which Lang quotes: the town of Sládkovičovo had the building demolished in the first half of the 1970s, that is, by the Communist-era town authorities. If the witness is right, the ruin was cleared between 1945 and 1947; if the encyclopedia is right, the building stood until the 1970s. Who looted or wrecked the synagogue after the community was taken away in 1944 is not recorded.

גורל הקהילה

After the First Vienna Award of 2 November 1938 Diószeg was annexed to Hungary, and its Jews were subjected to the Hungarian anti-Jewish laws, beginning with Law XV of 1938. In 1944, Lang writes, the deportations were managed by the official Hungarian government. Lang's study preserves the name list of the Diószeg Jews transferred to the ghetto in Galanta; the community chairman Armin Wohlstein and his wife appear on it as numbers 94 and 95. According to Pinkas Hakehillot, the Galanta ghetto was set up around the Galanta synagogue on 5 June 1944 and held the local Jews and about 600 others from nearby communities. A few days later they were taken to a concentration camp at Komárno, and on 13 June 1944 they were deported to Auschwitz. Lang's table records 24 Jews living in the town in 1948, against 110 in 1941. No organised religious life is known after the war.

האתר כיום

The exact plot of the synagogue has not been identified in any source read, so the pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Sládkovičovo and does not mark the building. According to the witness quoted by Lang, a detached family house was built on the site of the synagogue in 1947, and the site is therefore presumably private residential land today. If the encyclopedia's account is correct, the site was cleared only in the early 1970s and may have been built over later. No fragment of the synagogue is known to survive. The Jewish cemetery of the community survives at 1343 Pionierska Street, where a memorial to the Holocaust victims stands. Fixing the address will need old cadastral maps or the town's local-history publications.

שמות בולטים