Stropkov Hasidic Synagogue

The Jewish community

Jews settled in Stropkov around 1650, were expelled about fifty years later to the neighbouring village of Tisinec and returned only around 1800, when, according to the memorial book of Avraham Avish Weinstein, they built their first synagogue, with a stone plaque bearing the names of its founders. Borský counts 573 Jews in the 1830s, 26 per cent of the town, and later 919, 45.5 per cent. Stropkov was the mother community of the surrounding villages. Its rabbinate passed through the Teitelbaum, Gottlieb and Halberstam families. Yechezkel Shraga Halberstam, eldest son of Chaim Halberstam of Sanz, held the post and, Weinstein recalls, drew Hasidim from Poland, Hungary and further afield, so that every house became a guest house. Borský names the court of Avraham Shalom Halberstam, chief rabbi from 1897, as the reason Stropkov became a Hasidic centre of north-eastern Slovakia; during the Russian offensive of 1915 the court moved south to Košice. The Hasidic group that took its name from the town still exists in Jerusalem.

Architecture and design

No photograph of the building was found online; Borský's figure 490, showing its north and east façades, is reproduced only in his dissertation. The two written descriptions agree on the main point and differ in detail. Borský describes a simple single-storey building whose eastern façade faced the street and reflected the interior: the Torah ark was in the axis of a four-window façade, so the position of the ark could be read from outside. He cites it, with prayer halls in Žilina and Bardejov, as an example of the smaller Hasidic house of prayer that looks like an ordinary house in the street, its sanctuary legible only from an array of windows. The Slovak gazetteer, following the Stropkov town monograph, calls it Classicist, describes a five-bay east façade with a round window above the ark, and places the rabbi's flat at the rear, with a flat timber ceiling under a gabled roof. Borský's date of 1920 is marked as a restoration, which may reflect repairs after the First World War. The architect, the builder, the capacity and the interior fittings are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

The building served the Hasidim of Stropkov, the branch of the community attached to the Halberstam rebbes of the Sanz line, while the Ashkenazic congregation used the larger synagogue of 1894 behind it. The rabbi lived in the flat at the back of the building, which tied the prayer house closely to the rabbinate. Weinstein's memorial book, written by a man who lived in Stropkov until 1914, recalls a special holy atmosphere around the synagogue and the Rebbe's home while Yechezkel Shraga Halberstam held court, with visitors seeking a private audience and his blessing before going home. He also recalls that the dayan Yitzhak Hersh Amsel preached on Sabbaths in both of the town's synagogues, and that the beit midrash filled with the whole community on Sabbath mornings. Private minyanim met in family homes on Friday nights. The sources do not say which rabbis officiated in this building in particular, how the Hasidic and Ashkenazic congregations divided communal duties, or how the prayer house was used after the court moved to Košice in 1915.

Destruction

No source records damage to the building during the Second World War. It stood without a congregation after the deportations of 1942 and 1944, and the few survivors did not rebuild the community. The Slovak monument gazetteer, citing the 1994 Stropkov town monograph, says that the town's nineteenth-century Jewish religious buildings were not preserved: they decayed for a long period and were cleared away in the 1980s. Borský also records the Hasidic prayer hall as demolished in the 1980s, in the last decade of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Most of the houses and shops of the former Jewish quarter around it were razed after the war as well. No exact year has been found for the demolition of this building. Who ordered or carried out the demolition, and whether the building had first been sold or put to another use, is not recorded in the sources consulted.

The community’s fate

In 1939 the antisemitic Hlinka Party took control of the Stropkov town council. About 2,000 Jews lived in Stropkov and its surrounding villages in 1942. Between May and October 1942 the Hlinka Guard deported them through the concentration points of Žilina and Poprad to Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor and other places in occupied Poland; the community's name index records a transport from Stropkov on 23 May 1942 to Rejowiec and another in June 1942 via Poprad to Sobibor. In October 1944 the Nazis resumed deportations and sent the remaining Jews to Auschwitz. By the end of the war about 100 Stropkov Jews had survived. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Halberstam survived and taught at the Stropkover yeshiva in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, until his death in 1954. The Stropkov Hasidic dynasty continues in Jerusalem, but no Jews live in the town today.

The site today

The prayer house stood at the street front of the communal plot on the north side of Hrnčiarska street in central Stropkov, with the 1894 synagogue behind it to the west. Both are gone, and visitors' accounts list the shul, the beit midrash, the mikveh and the Rebbe's house as vanished. Most of the former Jewish quarter was rebuilt after the war, and what now stands on the exact plot has not been established. The map pin follows the Slovak monument gazetteer's coordinates for the Stropkov synagogues, which fall near today's Námestie SNP; the present-day Hrnčiarska street in OpenStreetMap lies a few hundred metres to the south-west, so the pin is approximate. The two Jewish cemeteries, at Tisinec and in Stropkov, are the only Jewish sites left in the town.

Notable names