Old Synagogue of Slavkov u Brna (Austerlitz)

La comunità ebraica

Jewish settlement in Austerlitz reaches back to the Middle Ages, and the community grew when Jewish families expelled from Brno settled there around 1455. Its most prosperous period came in the two centuries before the Thirty Years' War, when Jewish merchants traded in wine, hops, textiles and salt; the Jewish Encyclopedia adds that starch and lime were important, so that Hebrew sources called the town the White City. Jews owned 65 houses before that war and 30 after it. In 1567 sales of houses between Jews and Christians were forbidden, and in the late seventeenth century an order was issued to destroy the Jewish cemetery. Under the Moravian familiant laws 72 Jewish families were allowed to live in Austerlitz in the late eighteenth century. The Jewish Encyclopedia also gives a figure of about 445 people in 34 houses. The community was at its largest when the old synagogue was replaced: about 540 Jews lived in the town in 1857. By 1930 only 66 Jews remained.

Architettura e design

No image, plan, measured drawing or written description of the old synagogue has been found in the sources consulted, so its form, materials, seating and interior arrangement are all unknown. What is known is limited to its history. A synagogue already stood in the Judengasse before 1762 and was destroyed by the great town fire of that year. The congregation rebuilt it with money given by all the Jewish communities of Moravia, which suggests a building of some size and importance for the region. About 1850 the building was restored. When it was pulled down in 1857/58 its foundations were reused for the new synagogue, so the plan of the new building, a neo-Romanesque hall with a gabled front, probably reflects at least the footprint of the old one; that is an inference, not a documented fact. A small 1750 map of the town in the de.wikipedia article does not show the building in identifiable form. Who designed or built either the pre-1762 synagogue or its replacement after the fire is not recorded.

La vita nella sinagoga

The rabbis who taught in the old synagogue are known by name from the manuscripts of Rabbi Josef Weisse, summarised in the Jewish Encyclopedia. After the fire of 1762, the rebuilt synagogue was served by Simhah Leipnik, listed for 1770, Elijah Hirsch Istels for 1780, Jacob Gleiwitz for 1790, Gerson Buchheim for 1811 and Hirsch Duschak for 1845. Earlier rabbis of the community, from Rabbi Löb in 1560 to Nathan Feitel in 1703, served the synagogue that burned. The congregation's standing among Moravian Jews is shown by the synods held in the town and by the regional collection that paid for the rebuilding. Around 1850, when the building was restored, a liberal form of worship was introduced, according to the Jüdische Gemeinden history; the sources do not say what changes this involved. Nothing more is recorded about services, the cantors, the seating of women or the furnishings of the old building. The furnishings sent to Prague during the Nazi occupation belonged to the later synagogue.

Distruzione

The old synagogue was not destroyed by violence. The Jüdische Gemeinden history and the de.wikipedia article on the synagogue both state that in 1857/58 the old building was pulled down to make way for a new one. The demolition was therefore carried out on behalf of the congregation itself, which was then at its largest, with some 540 members, and wanted a larger and more modern house of prayer. The new synagogue was built on the foundations of the old one in neo-Romanesque style and consecrated in 1858; the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Jewish Heritage guide date it to 1857. No document of the demolition has been found, and neither the builder who took the old building down nor what happened to its materials and fittings is recorded. Its earlier loss in the fire of 1762, which burned much of the town and the Jewish quarter, was a separate event; the building was rebuilt after that fire and stood for almost another hundred years.

Il destino della comunità

After 1858 the Jewish community of Slavkov declined, and an antisemitic riot broke out in the town in 1905. About 45 Jewish families remained around 1925, and the 1930 census counted 66 Jews. After the Nazi German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939, the remaining Jews of Slavkov were deported together with the Jews of Brno, in late 1941 or early 1942 according to the Jüdische Gemeinden history and in 1942 according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica. They were taken first to the Theresienstadt ghetto and from there to the extermination camps, Auschwitz among them. The Nazi occupation authorities sent the furnishings of the 1858 synagogue to the Central Jewish Museum in Prague, and some Torah scrolls survived. More than 120 Jews from Slavkov and the surrounding area were murdered in the Holocaust; no postwar Jewish community in the town is recorded in the sources read.

Il luogo oggi

The site of the old synagogue is occupied by its successor, the synagogue consecrated in 1858, which was built on the old foundations and still stands in the former Jewish street, now U Synagogy, near Úzká Street, close to the town square. The Jewish Museum in Prague photographed it in 1986 among the last houses of the former ghetto, much of which had been cleared by then. The restored building today houses the Vyškov district state archive, and a small exhibition on the history of the community has been open to visitors since the late 1990s. A plaque on the building, unveiled in 1998, commemorates the Holocaust victims of the town and its surroundings. Nothing of the pre-1858 building is visible above ground. The Jewish cemetery outside the town also survives.

Nomi importanti