Cheb (Eger) Synagogue

The Jewish community

Cheb had one of Bohemia's oldest Jewish communities, documented from the 13th century. Almost the entire community was massacred in 1350, and later settlements ended in expulsions in 1430 and 1502. A few families lived in the town between the late 17th and mid-18th centuries.

The modern community began with a religious association founded in 1862, formally established as a religious community about ten years later. It grew quickly with the town's commercial development. Around 1867–70 it began a large synagogue on Opitzstraße (today Sládkova), but the project stalled at the foundations or ground floor. Sources disagree on why: one account cites lack of money, another a malicious desecration of the unfinished structure. The town bought it and completed it as a municipal gymnasium in 1875.

The congregation then worshipped in a converted inn hall with a women's gallery, used until 1893. Only in 1892 were sufficient funds raised to build a new synagogue. By the early 20th century, Eger had a reputation as a centre of virulent antisemitism within the Habsburg Empire. In 1921 there were 515 Jews in Cheb.

Architecture and design

The building was a three-aisled basilica with a flat roof and two transepts. Over the crossing rose a very high dome with a gilded spire, echoed by small domed lanterns on each corner. Contemporary descriptions link the dome to Byzantine models then favoured for synagogues, while the exterior detail, including Lombard arcade friezes, pilasters and dwarf galleries, was Romanesque.

Worshippers entered through a portal on the west façade in Hradební Street. Above it sat a rose window about 4 metres across, five small grouped arcaded windows and a triangular gable topped with sandstone Ten Commandments tablets. The vestibule had 16 sandstone columns under Romanesque vaulting. The nave, about 15 metres high, was separated from the aisles by tall decorated columns.

Women's galleries surrounded the hall on three sides, opening onto the nave through round-arched arcades. The Torah ark stood in a semicircular eastern apse. An organ by Martin Zaus stood above the women's gallery. Painted ornament and arabesques, attributed mainly to local artist Andreas Pabler, covered the walls and coffered ceiling, while the dome and apse ceiling depicted a starry sky.

Life inside the synagogue

Documentation of worship in the building is thin. The layout confirms separate women's galleries with their own entrances, a Torah ark in the eastern apse, and a reading desk flanked by two candelabra. Sources disagree on the desk's position: one places it at the centre of the raised crossing, the other directly in front of the ark, and the 1903 interior photograph appears to show it in front of the ark.

The presence of an organ, built by Martin Zaus, who also made the organ for Cheb's Church of St Nicholas, suggests a liberal rite, but this is an inference: no source found here confirms the congregation's formal affiliation.

Names of rabbis and cantors who served in this building, details of festivals, community institutions and cultural events held in it, and records of its consecration ceremony could not be verified from accessible sources.

Destruction

After the Munich Agreement, German troops occupied Cheb in early October 1938 and the town was annexed as part of the Sudetenland. During the November 1938 pogrom, Nazis set the synagogue on fire. A Cheb Museum historian dates the arson to about 6:30 pm on Thursday 10 November 1938. Firefighters were ordered not to fight the blaze and only protected neighbouring buildings. That evening the Jewish cemetery was also damaged, and the Jewish street was renamed after Ernst vom Rath.

The 2004 site plaque also gives 10 November 1938. Sources conflict on the date, however. Two texts on the same Cheb municipal encyclopedia page give 8 November and 9 November. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that the town's two synagogues were burned on 23 September 1938, during the Sudeten crisis and before the German occupation. That claim is not corroborated by the local sources.

The individual perpetrators and the specific unit responsible (for example, local SA men) are not named in the sources found. The catalogue note that the building was blown up is not supported: all sources found describe arson. The town financed the demolition of the ruins from 28 November 1938 to 28 February 1939.

The community’s fate

Most of Cheb's Jews left during the Sudeten crisis of 1938, before the German occupation. The community had numbered 491 people in 1930, about 1.5 percent of the town's population. Where they went, and how many were later caught by the German advance into the rest of Czechoslovakia and murdered in the Holocaust, could not be verified from the sources found. The 2004 memorial plaque states that many Cheb Jews died in concentration and extermination camps.

In January 1945 a transport of prisoners from Auschwitz stopped at Cheb railway station, and 139 bodies were removed and cremated locally. These victims were not members of the Cheb community.

After the war, a congregation of about 200 people was organised in 1945. It dispersed by 1947. By 1962, ten Jewish families were living in Cheb. A memorial to Jewish Holocaust victims was unveiled in 1969 on the site of the Jewish cemetery destroyed by the Nazis.

The site today

Nothing of the synagogue survives above ground. After the war the cleared plot held a fire-water reservoir and a school playground. A prefabricated concrete panel building was later built on the site; the municipal encyclopedia dates it to the 1980s, while the Cheb Museum historian gives 1993. On 10 November 2004 a memorial plaque recalling the synagogue was unveiled on this building. The Chebský deník caption describes it as the building of an integrated school.

Two earlier modern Jewish buildings in Cheb also no longer stand. The unfinished first synagogue, completed as a gymnasium, was destroyed in an air raid in 1945, and the converted inn used as the second prayer hall was demolished after 1945.

Notable names