Stará Ľubovňa Synagogue

The Jewish community

The Jewish population of Stará Ľubovňa grew from 11 in 1828 to 88 in 1869, 250 in 1900 and 354 in 1930, when Jews were almost 17 per cent of the town. From the 1870s the congregation employed a shochet and a religious teacher who also served the Jews of nearby villages, and it kept a cheder, a Talmud Torah, a mikvah, a slaughterhouse and butcher shops. Its statutes were renewed in 1896. After the First World War it counted about 350 souls, some 100 of them tax-paying heads of family, with a budget of 60,000 crowns in 1922, a study hall and a community house with flats for its employees. Jews owned 37 businesses, 14 workshops, a sawmill, a flour mill and a soap factory, and included two doctors, among them the district physician David Neuwirth, a dentist and two lawyers. Two Jews sat on the town council in the 1920s, and the Jewish National Party won 70 votes in 1928. Zionist groups, Hashomer Hatzair, Bnei Akiva, Betar and Agudas Yisroel were all active.

Architecture and design

Almost nothing is known of the building's design. Pinkas Hakehillot Slovakia describes the synagogue built in the 1880s as being in the traditional style and gives its size as 13 by 15 metres, but says nothing of its appearance. Maroš Borský knew the synagogue from a single historical photograph kept in the archive of the local museum, published in his book as figure 488 with the caption 'Stará Ľubovňa, Synagogue, North Façade'. From that picture he describes a simple two-storey building with traditional proportions and a saddleback roof. Only a side façade was visible. It had two rows of windows, those in the upper row round-arched, and the façade was crowned by a broad gable. Borský dates the building to after the First World War, in the 1920s or 1930s, and in his overview of interwar synagogues names it, with Zlaté Moravce, among the less interesting buildings of that period. The architect, the builder, the seating capacity, the layout of the women's gallery and the interior are unknown, and the museum photograph itself was not seen in this research.

Life inside the synagogue

The congregation was Orthodox from 1869 and, according to Pinkas Hakehillot, had a rabbi of its own from the end of the nineteenth century. The first was Rabbi Yitzchak (Isidor) Friedman, who led the community until the end of the 1920s, when he was elected rabbi of the Orthodox congregation of Trnava. His successor was Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg, who remained the town's rabbi until the deportations of 1942. Lay leadership lay with the community president: Theo Grün after the First World War and Bernat Bleier at the end of the 1920s. Because the town had no Jewish day school until 1940, children attended the public school and studied religion in the Talmud Torah under Rabbi Eliezer Lipman Kohn. Beside the chevra kadisha, the community supported a Jewish women's association, a Bikur Cholim society for visiting the sick and other charities. In 1940, after Jewish children were expelled from the state schools, the congregation opened an eight-year school of its own for the whole district, first under A. Brunner and later under Livia Wildrof; it ran until the spring of 1944.

Destruction

No source consulted records what happened to the synagogue building during the Second World War. In 1941 young local ethnic Germans, many of the town's Germans being members of the pro-Nazi German Party, repeatedly rioted against the Jews, attacking them in the streets and breaking into and looting their flats and shops, but the synagogue is not mentioned in the account. In autumn 1944 the town fell into Nazi German hands during the Slovak National Uprising. Pinkas Hakehillot says that the roughly fifty Jews who returned after liberation repaired some communal buildings damaged in the war and briefly revived the congregation, which ended when the last Jews left in 1949. Maroš Borský records the synagogue as 'Demolished: after World War II', and the Slovak heritage database pamiatkynaslovensku.sk, citing him, says it was pulled down after 1945. Neither gives a year, and who demolished it is not recorded. The Pinkas volume of 2003 instead states that the synagogue then served as a warehouse, which may reflect older information or a different building.

The community’s fate

Soon after the Slovak State was founded in March 1939, anti-Jewish decrees followed one another; in early 1940 the local ethnic Germans demanded that the Jews be removed from the district, where some 330 Jews lived in the town and about 400 in surrounding villages. In 1941 the authorities closed 41 Jewish businesses and aryanized seven more, and 59 unemployed Jews were sent to forced labour. On 21 March 1942, 47 young women from the area were seized and sent via the Poprad transit camp to Auschwitz on 25 March; young men were taken on 1 April through Žilina to Majdanek. Families were deported from May 1942 through Poprad to Auschwitz and to ghettos and camps in the Lublin district. About 650 Jews of the district were deported that year, among them Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg. About 20 escaped to Hungary. On 16 October 1944, with the help of local Germans, members of the Nazi SS arrested and murdered 21 of the town's remaining Jews. About ten fought with the partisans or the Czechoslovak army. About 50 Jews returned after the war, but by 1949 the last had left, mostly for Israel.

The site today

The site of the synagogue has not been identified in any source consulted, and none of them names its street or plot, so what stands there today is unknown. The heritage database pamiatkynaslovensku.sk gives a map point in the Podsadek quarter near Obrancov mieru street, but does not say what it is based on. No surviving fragment of the building is recorded. The Jewish cemetery survives on Jarmočná street beside house no. 77; Pinkas Hakehillot reports that most of its tombstones were destroyed. Stolpersteine for the Blayer family have been laid on Námestie sv. Mikuláša. Finding the site will need the museum photograph, old cadastral maps or the town archive.

Notable names