Stropkov Synagogue

סקירה

הסיפור של Stropkov Synagogue

Stropkov, a small town in north-eastern Slovakia, was known in Hungarian as Sztropkó. Jews settled there from Poland in the seventeenth century, were expelled to the neighbouring village of Tisinec about 1700, and returned around 1800. By the nineteenth century they made up close to half of the town, and Stropkov became, in Maroš Borský's words, one of the most important centres of the Hasidic movement in Slovakia, the seat of a court of the Halberstam dynasty of Sanz.

The community worshipped in two rites. The Hasidim prayed in an older building on the north side of Hrnčiarska street, at the front of a shared plot. The Ashkenazim, called the 'Datschen' congregation in the Slovak gazetteer of monuments, built themselves a larger synagogue in 1894 on the western part of the same plot, behind the Hasidic house. This entry concerns that 1894 building. It was a plain free-standing hall under a hipped roof, its entrance front marked by a round window between round-arched windows. Only one historical photograph of it is known. The building outlived the community, served as a storehouse after the Second World War and was demolished in the 1980s, together with the Hasidic prayer house.

מיקום

Where it stood

Historic: north side of Hrnčiarska street, rear (western) part of the plot shared with the Hasidic prayer house, Stropkov. Today: town centre near Námestie SNP, 091 01 Stropkov (approximate).

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הקהילה היהודית

Jews are first recorded in Stropkov about 1650, probably refugees from Poland who sought safety under the Habsburgs. About fifty years later they were expelled to Tisinec, just north of the town, where they founded a cemetery; they returned to Stropkov only around 1800 and then built their first synagogue, which bore a stone plaque with the founders' names. In the census of 1830-35 Borský counts 573 Jews, 26 per cent of the population, the third-largest community in eastern Slovakia; he later gives 919 Jews, 45.5 per cent of the town. Jews owned most of the shops, though most lived in poverty, and Stropkov served as the mother community for surrounding villages, with burial societies, kosher butchers, a rabbinical court, a mikveh and schools. A new cemetery was dedicated in 1892. The rabbinate passed through the Teitelbaum, Gottlieb and Halberstam families: Yechezkel Shraga Halberstam, son of Chaim Halberstam of Sanz, was followed by Moshe Yosef Teitelbaum and, from 1897, by Avraham Shalom Halberstam, whose Hasidic court made the town famous. During the Russian offensive of 1915 his court moved to Košice.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

Borský, who based his description on the single surviving historical image, describes the 1894 synagogue as a simple free-standing building topped by a hipped roof. The main entrance lay on the western façade, which was emphasised by a round window flanked on both sides by round-arched windows. That orientation agrees with the gazetteer's statement that the building stood on the western part of the plot, so that worshippers entered from the west and faced the Torah ark on the east wall. It was the larger of the town's two synagogues. The older Hasidic house in front of it, on Hrnčiarska street, was a single-storey structure whose street front, the east façade, had four windows with the ark on its axis, so that the interior arrangement could be read from outside. The gazetteer calls the older building classicist and dates it to the first half of the nineteenth century; Borský dates its present form to 1920, when it was restored. The architect of the 1894 synagogue, its builder, its dimensions, the arrangement of the women's gallery and its seating capacity are unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

No detailed description of services in the 1894 synagogue has been found. The memoir of Avraham Avish Weinstein, who left Stropkov for America in 1914, describes a town whose religious life turned on the synagogues and the beit midrash, which hummed with study morning and evening, and on the Rebbe's house close by. Around 1880, he recalls, the dayan Reb Yitzhak Hersh, evidently Yitzhak Hersh Amsel, gave lectures in both synagogues where he attended services on Sabbaths, which suggests that a second house of worship existed before the present building of 1894 was put up. Borský describes a community praying in two liturgical formats: the Hasidim, followers of the Halberstam rebbes of Sanz descent who held court in the town, and the Ashkenazim, who prayed in the larger synagogue. The town shared one chief rabbi and rabbinical court, a Talmud Torah and a mikveh with the villages around it, but how the 1894 synagogue's own congregation was led is unknown.

הרס

No source records damage to the synagogue during the Second World War; after the deportations of 1942 and 1944 it stood without a congregation. Borský states that it was used as a storehouse after the war, and the Slovak gazetteer of monuments says that Stropkov's nineteenth-century Jewish religious buildings decayed for a long time and were cleared away in the 1980s, in the last decade of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. A published list of Slovak synagogues gives 1985 as the year, but no second source confirms it. The Hasidic prayer house in front of it was demolished in the same decade. Most of the houses and shops of the former Jewish quarter were also razed after the war. None of the sources consulted names the body that ordered the demolition or the people who carried it out, or says whether the building was first sold.

גורל הקהילה

In 1939 the antisemitic Hlinka Party won control of the town council. About 2,000 Jews lived in Stropkov and its surrounding villages in 1942. Between March and October 1942 the Hlinka Guard deported them through the concentration points of Žilina and Poprad to Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor, the Lublin district and other destinations in occupied Poland; the community's name index records transports from Stropkov on 23 May 1942 to Rejowiec and in June 1942 via Poprad to Sobibor, and a photograph in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shows Stropkov Jews being loaded onto trucks under uniformed guard on 21 May 1942. In October 1944 the Nazis resumed deportations and sent the remaining Jews to Auschwitz. Soviet forces liberated Stropkov in November 1944. About 100 Stropkov Jews survived. The rebbe Menachem Mendel Halberstam survived and later taught at a Stropkover yeshiva in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the Stropkov Hasidim continue today in Jerusalem. No Jews live in the town now.

האתר כיום

The synagogue stood in the centre of Stropkov, on the western part of a plot on the north side of Hrnčiarska street, close to today's Námestie SNP. Nothing of the building, the Hasidic house in front of it, the beit midrash or the mikveh survives, and visitors' accounts describe all of them as gone. The surrounding Jewish quarter was largely rebuilt after the war, and what now occupies the exact plot has not been established. Stropkov's two Jewish cemeteries, the old one at Tisinec and the one dedicated in 1892, are the only remaining Jewish sites in the town.

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