Synagogue of Spišská Nová Ves

La comunità ebraica

The first Jewish families, those of Baruch Tyrnauer and Emanuel Klein, arrived in 1852; five years later the town had 38 Jews, who belonged to the community of Markušovce until they formed their own congregation in the 1860s. After the Hungarian Jewish Congress of 1868–1869 about 120 local Jews chose the Status Quo Ante path. The railway made the town the largest in Spiš and drew Jewish traders, industrialists and families seeking good schools: 429 Jews lived there in 1890 (5.5 per cent) and 620 in 1900 (6.6 per cent). From the 1870s services were held in a rented house on Zimná ulica and later in several private houses, while a small Orthodox group prayed in the house of Ladislav Szella. In 1893 the community bought land opposite the teachers' college, and in 1895 a 45-member Synagogue Building Society was founded with capital of 11,400 florins.

Architettura e design

The synagogue was described at its consecration as 'entirely in the Moorish style, with skilfully used modern and classical forms and motifs'. Its front had two towers with a pediment between them carrying a gilded Star of David, symmetrical Moorish windows, and walls articulated by paired pilasters. Three large doors, each 1.8 by 3 metres, led into a 7.5 by 5 metre vestibule, with the side doors opening onto spiral stone staircases of about thirty steps to the upper floor. The main hall had a Venetian chequered floor in yellow and brick red. Over the centre ran a false barrel vault on paired cast-iron columns 13 cm thick, set 13 metres apart; part of the ceiling was blue with gilded stars. Women's galleries on iron beams and wooden balconies ran along both sides and over the entrance. In an apse on the east wall stood a tall wooden Torah ark beneath a round window and a brick half-dome. The roof was covered with sheet metal and shingles.

La vita nella sinagoga

The synagogue became the meeting place and centre of religious life for the Jews of Spišská Nová Ves. Its first rabbi was Áron Krausz (1872–1929), a graduate of the Bratislava rabbinical school, known for preaching in Hungarian and said to have lent dignity to the Hungarian language. After his death he was succeeded by Dr Bartolomej Rosenstein (1880–1942), a doctor of philosophy, philology and theology. Books were kept on the upper floor. A new Jewish elementary school was built nearby, and the area around the synagogue became one of the town's most prestigious streets, home to the mayor Kornel Folgens and the Hajts family, founders of the oldest private observatory in eastern Slovakia. After the synagogue was burned, the community set up a temporary prayer room in the house of the merchant Jakub Pollák at Letná ulica 51.

Distruzione

After the proclamation of the Slovak State, local Nazi sympathisers tried to set the synagogue on fire twice, on 23 and 24 June 1939, but it survived. On 1 May 1941 Eugen Kežmarský, a prominent local German Nazi, brought a group of Hitler Youth members visiting Spiš from Germany to the town in two lorries borrowed from the 'aryaniser' of the Pollák firm. After a speech in the courtyard of the German school next door, they climbed the fence, tore the gilded Star of David and the two Tablets of the Law from the front, broke down the doors with axes, smashed the interior, doused the building with petrol and set it on fire. The fire left it a gutted shell; a few days later the same group desecrated the Jewish cemetery. The historian Eugen Bárkány described the burned-out ruin in the 1950s; according to local memory it was taken apart for bricks in 1957–1958.

Il destino della comunità

Most of the Jews of Spišská Nová Ves were deported to Nazi concentration and extermination camps in 1942 and 1944; only about ten per cent survived the Holocaust. Rabbi Bartolomej Rosenstein died in 1942. After the war the ruined synagogue was owned by the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Slovakia and offered for sale in 1949. One Torah scroll from the town survived and is now at the Northwood and Pinner Liberal Synagogue in London. The Jewish cemetery, now on the Slovak Jewish Heritage Route, is the main surviving trace of the community.

Il luogo oggi

Nothing of the synagogue survives. After it was dismantled in 1957–1958, a municipal summer cinema was built on the site at the end of the 1960s. After the cinema closed, the plot on Školská ulica, opposite the grammar school (the former teachers' college), fell into neglect and is now closed off from the street by an old metal fence.

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