История Smolenice Synagogue
Smolenice lies at the foot of the Little Carpathians north-west of Trnava, below the castle that the Pálffy family acquired in 1777. From the sixteenth century it grew into a small manorial market town with fair rights, and it was in this setting that a Jewish community settled. Its synagogue is first recorded in 1786, when Ján Matej Korabinský's geographical lexicon of Hungary described Smolenice as a market town with a Catholic church and a Jewish synagogue. How much earlier the building existed, and whether the structure that survived into the twentieth century was the same one, is unknown.
What is known of its appearance comes from local recollection gathered by the historian Ema Bihárová for the village monograph of 2011: it resembled the church in the neighbouring village of Smolenická Nová Ves, had no tower and had taller windows. No photograph or plan has been found.
The building outlived its congregation by only a few years. After the Second World War it was demolished and its bricks were used for other buildings. The site is now occupied by the village post office on the main street. The synagogue is not included in Maroš Borský's 2005 catalogue of Slovak synagogue architecture, and it is missing from published lists of Slovak synagogues, so this short record rests largely on the village monograph.
Where it stood for 159 years
Historic: Smolenice (Szomolány), Pozsony county; street and number unknown. Today: site of the post office, SNP street, 919 04 Smolenice, Trnava district (approximate).
Открыть большую карту →Еврейская община
Very little has been published on the Jews of Smolenice. The community was established by 1786 at the latest, since a synagogue is recorded in that year, and it lived in a market town owned by great noble families, latterly the Pálffys, who held the castle from 1777. Smolenice itself counted 182 houses and 1,316 inhabitants in 1828; the size of the Jewish population in that or any other year is unknown. Family names that can be traced to the town include Sidon: Márkusz Meir Sidon and his wife Rozália had six children, all born in Smolenice, and their son Jakub, born there in 1896, still lived on the main street in 1942. Friedrich Beinhacker lived in neighbouring Neštich, now Smolenická Nová Ves. The community's rabbis, officers, religious orientation and institutions are not recorded in the sources found, nor whether it kept its own rabbi or belonged to the rabbinate of a larger town such as Trnava. The Jewish cemetery survives on an isolated wooded hillside, where about twenty twentieth-century tombstones with Hebrew and German inscriptions still stand.
Архитектура и дизайн
No photograph, drawing or plan of the synagogue has been found, so its form is known only from a brief description recorded in the 2011 village monograph. According to local recollection, the building looked like the church in Smolenická Nová Ves, the neighbouring village now joined to Smolenice. Unlike that church, it had no tower, and its windows were taller. This suggests a plain, free-standing hall with a pitched roof and tall arched or rectangular windows along its sides, a type common among small rural synagogues of western Slovakia, but that reading is an inference, not a documented fact. The building was of brick, since its bricks were salvaged after demolition. Its construction date, builder, dimensions, seating capacity and the arrangement of the interior, including the position of the ark and bimah and whether there was a women's gallery, are all unknown. It is also unknown whether the synagogue recorded in 1786 was rebuilt or replaced in the nineteenth century.
Жизнь в синагоге
No record of services, rabbis, cantors or communal officers at the Smolenice synagogue has been found. The congregation was small and rural, serving Jewish families in a market town whose economy rested on agriculture, vineyards, mills and the Pálffy estate, and in the nineteenth century on Count Pálffy's chemical and wood-processing works nearby. Members also lived in neighbouring Neštich (Smolenická Nová Ves). Whether the community followed the Orthodox or the Neolog path is unknown, as is whether it maintained its own school or ritual bath. The survival of a Jewish cemetery with tombstones inscribed in Hebrew and German shows that the community buried its own dead locally into the twentieth century. The village monograph's chapter on the Jews of Smolenice by Ema Bihárová, which was not available for this entry, is likely to contain more about religious life.
Разрушение
The synagogue survived the war years without recorded damage, but it lost its congregation in the spring of 1942. According to the 2011 village monograph, after the Second World War the synagogue was demolished and its bricks were used for further buildings. The source gives no year for the demolition and does not say who ordered or carried it out, whether the building was sold first, or which buildings received the salvaged bricks. Since the war ended in 1945 and the post office now stands on the plot, the demolition is likely to have taken place in the late 1940s or under Communist rule, but no document has been found to confirm a date or an actor.
Судьба общины
In the spring of 1942 the Slovak State deported Jews from Smolenice to Nazi German camps and ghettos in occupied Poland. On 11 April 1942 Jakub Sidon, born in Smolenice in 1896, his wife Júlia née Blau, their daughter Blanka, born in 1934, and his widowed mother Rozália, then 79, were deported from Trnava to the Lublin district; all four were murdered. Júlia's parents and five siblings were also killed. Friedrich Beinhacker, born in 1907 and living in neighbouring Neštich, was deported from Sereď on 13 April 1942 to Auschwitz and murdered there that year. The stumbling stones placed for them disagree with the published biographies about some destinations and the year of Júlia's death. How many Smolenice Jews were deported in total, and whether any survived or returned after 1945, is unknown. In the 2021 census two inhabitants of Smolenice declared Jewish ethnicity.
Место сегодня
The synagogue stood where the Smolenice post office stands today, on SNP street, the main road through the village (route 502). Nothing of the building survives above ground; its bricks were dispersed into other buildings after the war. The map pin marks the post office as recorded in OpenStreetMap. A heritage gazetteer gives a different point about 750 metres to the north-east, so the precise plot should be confirmed locally. On SNP 290/85 and Obrancov mieru 43, stumbling stones laid in 2016 commemorate five murdered Jewish residents. The Jewish cemetery survives on a wooded hillside outside the village, unmarked and threatened by vandalism, with about twenty tombstones in their original places.
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Фотографии, документы, семейные истории и воспоминания об этой синагоге и её общине помогают сохранить её историю.
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