Old Synagogue of Stráž

הקהילה היהודית

Klimsa and Polák, writing in 1934, place Jews in the town from at least 1331 and say Charles IV confirmed their rights in 1356. Because the wooden town burned repeatedly and early documents were lost in the Hussite wars, the town archive only begins in 1580, when a tax register lists fifteen Jewish heads of household, ten of them house owners, with names such as Lazarus, Jakob, Isaak, Salomon, Moyses, Veit, Hirsch and Abraham. Agreements with the Christian butchers in 1618 and 1620 fixed how many animals Jews could slaughter, and the town required its permission for any new Jewish house. Only two families remained in 1620 and none are listed in 1651, but families returned in the later seventeenth century, which is when the synagogue was built. The community counted 18 families and 98 people in 1724, about 45 families around 1820 to 1830 and 47 families, the permitted maximum, about 1850. There was no closed ghetto: Jewish and Christian houses stood mixed, with about fifteen Jewish-owned houses in the Judengasse in 1838.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

No picture, plan or description of the old synagogue has been found. The 1934 history says only that the community possessed its own building, erected about two hundred years before the fire, and that a separate Jewish community house stood alongside it. According to the German Wikipedia article on the community, which draws on Jiří Fiedler's surveys of Jewish monuments in the Tachov area, the synagogue stood on the south side of the Judengasse and its successor was built on the old foundation walls, so the new building of the early 1880s probably repeats the old footprint. A piece of the later building's north wall with a niche for a washing basin survives in the courtyard of house No. 200, but nothing visible can be attributed with certainty to the older structure. The style, the architect or builder, the materials, the seating capacity and the arrangement of the interior are unknown. Since the 1934 account stresses that most houses in the town were of wood, the old synagogue may have been partly timber-built, but no source says so.

החיים בבית הכנסת

The congregation followed its own old local rite, preserved in festival prayer books that the 1934 history describes as irreplaceable. A memorial book recorded the community's dead and its benefactors, and the community kept birth, marriage and death registers that went back further than the Josephine decrees of the 1780s. A burial society, the Chevra Kadisha, cared for the cemetery, which also served the Jews of nearby Bernartice; Samuel Weisz was its head until he resigned exactly a year after the fire, on 20 May 1877. The community also ran a Jewish elementary school until about 1850, after which only religious instruction remained. Teachers who also served as rabbis or cantors are named as Moses Recht, S. Reich and Brummel, without dates, so it is not clear which of them taught while the old synagogue stood. The anniversary of the fire was later kept as a 'black Sabbath', when worshippers came to the synagogue without festive clothes and said special prayers.

הרס

The synagogue was destroyed by an accidental town fire, not by any human enemy. According to the 1934 history, on 20 May 1876 the temple, the Jewish community house and every Jewish house in the town were burned to ashes. The German Wikipedia article on the town states that the fire of 1876 destroyed more than half the town and 118 houses, and the parish church of St Wenceslas lost its furnishings in the same blaze. Inside the synagogue the festival prayer books burned, and the memorial book and the old registers were lost as well. The same 1934 text, in an earlier paragraph, dates a fire that levelled the whole town including the synagogue and community house to the summer of 1867; this is very probably a misprint for 1876, which all other sources give. The cause of the fire is not recorded in the sources read. Nothing of the old building was kept standing: the congregation built its new synagogue on the old foundation walls.

גורל הקהילה

After the fire the community, unable to replace its old prayer books, adopted the liturgy used generally in Bohemia, with the approval of Rabbi Isaak Schidlof of Tachov. The physician Dr Moritz Gans led the rebuilding of the synagogue, community house, school and ritual bath, and reconstructed the lost registers back to 1784. The new synagogue was in use by 1882. The town had about 75 Jews around 1880 and about 80 in 1900, but families kept moving to larger cities: there were 45 in 1921 and 31 of 976 inhabitants in 1930, and the 1934 history speaks of only about twelve paying members. In November 1938, under Nazi rule, the new synagogue was set on fire, and its ruins were cleared in the 1950s. The Jews who remained were deported by the Nazis; of those deported only one person returned. Most gravestones in the cemetery were taken for road building under Nazi rule, and in 2009 volunteers of Aktion Sühnezeichen re-erected about 35 recovered stones.

האתר כיום

The site lies on the south side of the former Judengasse, the street running west from the main square of Stráž towards the cemetery church. It was later occupied by the synagogue of the early 1880s, whose burned walls were demolished in the 1950s. A fragment of that later building's north wall, with a niche for a washing basin, is reported to survive in the courtyard of house No. 200; nothing of the pre-1876 synagogue is known to be visible. The old Jewish cemetery, a protected monument, survives on a wooded hill about 1.1 km north-west of the square. No marker for the old synagogue is recorded.

שמות בולטים