Sobrance Synagogue

La comunità ebraica

According to Pinkas Hakehillot, Mordechai Josefovitch, who rented the local distillery, lived in Sobrance with his family in the 1730s; Kahn's history names the first Jew in the 1739 county census as Marko Joseffovics. More families came from Galicia in the eighteenth century, and at first they belonged to the community of Užhorod. An independent community formed at the end of that century. The Jewish population rose from 106 in 1828 to 349 in 1880, about a third of the town, and was 395 in 1941. In 1869 the congregation joined the Orthodox organisation. Most Jews traded in cattle, farm produce and goods, and some owned land. In 1921 Jews held most of the town's shops and taverns, and they also owned the flour mill and a bank. Between the wars HaMizrahi was the strongest Zionist party, Bnei Akiva and Tseirei Agudat Yisrael were active, and the Jewish party's Dr. Eugen Preiss became head of the town council after the 1928 elections. In 1929, according to Kahn, Lazar Lebovits was president and the community counted 54 taxpayers.

Architettura e design

No photograph, drawing or plan of the synagogue was found in this research, so its appearance is unknown. The only document of its position is a hand-drawn map of Sobrance in 1919-1939, published by Vivian Kahn with the help of the local history teacher Denisa Vinanska. It marks the 'Synagóga' with a Star of David on the north side of Hlavná ulica, the main road between Michalovce and Užhorod, near a bridge over a stream and roughly opposite the fire brigade's store, west of the Roman Catholic church. The building's age is uncertain. If the date of about 1800 given by Kahn and by the JewishGen book is right, it was one of the older synagogue buildings of the region; Pinkas Hakehillot instead places a prayer house around 1810 and a new traditionalist, that is Orthodox, synagogue at the end of the nineteenth century. Its builder, materials, size, seating and interior arrangement are unknown, and nothing is recorded about the second synagogue that existed between the wars.

La vita nella sinagoga

The synagogue served a strictly Orthodox congregation that was the seat of a district rabbinate. Its first rabbi, David Leyb Eisenstaedter, son of the famous Rabbi Meir Eisenstaedter of Užhorod, signed the anti-Reform decree of the Orthodox rabbis' conference at Michalovce in 1865. In the 1880s Tsvi Hirsh Weiss was rabbi and Abraham Jakobovitch judge of the religious court. From 1891 Rabbi Simha Friedman, author of the work HaShemesh BiGvurotho, led the community for about forty years and headed a yeshiva with several dozen students, with Yehuda Weiss as judge. After his death in 1926 Ben-Tsion Halprin became rabbi, with Moshe Fried as rabbinical judge. Beside the synagogue the community kept a Talmud Torah, and for a time a four-class Hungarian-language elementary school; a burial society, a women's organisation, a society for visiting the sick and other charities were active.

Distruzione

Sobrance was annexed to Hungary in March 1939. On 16 April 1944, after the Nazi German occupation of Hungary, the Hungarian police rounded up the Jews of Sobrance and held them in the synagogue and nearby buildings, together with Jews brought in from surrounding villages. After about a week the prisoners were taken away and the building stood empty. Pinkas Hakehillot Slovakia states that the synagogue was destroyed 'by the Germans during the war', that is, by Nazi German forces, but gives no date, no circumstances and no unit. The town was taken by Soviet forces on 23 November 1944, so the destruction happened between the deportation and that date if it followed the round-up, as seems likely. No second source was found to confirm the account, describe the damage or say whether the walls were left standing. No other source read records looting or burning of this building.

Il destino della comunità

Under Hungarian rule Jews were pushed out of business, and in 1940 and 1941 dozens of men were taken for forced labour; many died in labour service or on the eastern front. In July 1941 the Hungarian police seized families without Hungarian citizenship and deported them to occupied Ukraine, where they were murdered. In March 1944 321 Jews remained. From 16 April 1944 they were held in the synagogue, and on 22 April they and the Jews of the surrounding villages were taken to a ghetto in the Jewish brick factory in Užhorod. Most were deported on the transport that left Užhorod for Auschwitz on 17 May 1944, where most were murdered. Some Sobrance Jews fought in the Czechoslovak army in the Soviet Union or with the partisans. After liberation about 200 survivors, some from nearby villages, gathered in the town under Dr. Hershkovitch. In 1949 most emigrated to Israel; 65 remained after 1950 and kept the community going until the 1960s.

Il luogo oggi

After the war the survivors built a new prayer house where the synagogue had stood, according to Pinkas Hakehillot. What became of that prayer house after the community dissolved in the 1960s, and what stands on the plot today, was not found in any source consulted. The 1919-1939 map places the synagogue on Hlavná ulica in the town centre, but the present-day street name and house number were not identified, so the map pin marks the centre of Sobrance and not the plot. The Jewish cemetery north-west of the centre survives; Pinkas Hakehillot described it as abandoned and neglected, and a local teacher and her students have since worked on restoring it.

Nomi importanti