Szabadszállás Synagogue

Еврейская община

The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon gives the founding of the Szabadszállás congregation as 1858 and names three of the first settlers, Dávid Stern, Márton Scheibel and Márton Löwinger. The town's website gives 1850 instead. The congregation was Orthodox. Its burial society, the Chevra Kadisha, was formed in 1862. The lexicon says the community developed well until the revolutions of 1918-19, after which many members fled or moved away and numbers fell sharply; one member was killed in the counter-revolution that followed. Gazda's figures show the same curve: 232 Jews in 1910 and 101 in 1941. In 1929 the lexicon counted 79 people in 38 families, with 38 taxpayers, in a town of 8,014 inhabitants. By occupation there were fourteen merchants, eight craftsmen, three farmers, nine people of private means, a lawyer, a doctor, one in a free profession and one other. The annual budget was 4,800 pengő, part of it spent on welfare and charity. The neighbouring village of Fülöpszállás belonged to its registry district. The officers in 1929 were Ödön Stern, president; Fülöp Löwensohn, vice-president; and Izidor Faragó, treasurer, with Miksa Fürst, József Engel, József Böhm and Dávid Stern on the board.

Архитектура и дизайн

No plan, written description or architect's name was found, so what follows is read from the five archive photographs. The synagogue was a small, single-storey, rendered rectangular hall under a half-hipped roof covered in sheet metal, with a ball finial at each end of the ridge. The entrance front faced a lane between farmhouses. It was divided by four flat pilasters carrying a moulded cornice, above which a low pediment-like gable held a large semicircular window. A double door stood in the centre, with a blind, corniced window panel on either side. The east end was plainer: a shallow central projection marked the position of the Torah ark, with a barred rectangular window on each side and another semicircular window in the gable. The long walls had windows with shallow arched heads in plain render frames. Inside, the hall was a single room under a shallow plastered vault held by iron tie rods. The ark stood in an arched recess at the top of a few steps. At the west end a women's gallery rested on two slender columns; its parapet was painted with six-pointed stars and carried a tall lattice screen.

Жизнь в синагоге

The congregation followed the Orthodox rite. The lexicon says that after building the synagogue the members elected Mayer Kalisch as their rabbi, and that he remained in office until he died in 1924; no successor is named in its 1929 entry. The Chevra Kadisha, founded in 1862, was led in 1929 by Sámuel Stern. Jews from Fülöpszállás were registered here, although Gazda records a separate synagogue of about 1880 in that village. Nine members served in the First World War and one was killed. Two objects in the Hungarian Jewish Museum hint at communal life: an enamelled brass badge of the Szabadszállás Israelite Girls' Association, dated 1912, and a painted tin Torah crown from Szabadszállás, its hoop set with imitation stones. The photographs show how the room was arranged: rows of plain wooden pews facing east on either side of a central aisle, iron lamp brackets on the walls, and the women seated apart in the west gallery behind a lattice screen. A doorway with a triangular pediment opened beneath the gallery.

Разрушение

No source found describes damage to the synagogue during the Second World War. It lost its congregation in 1944, when the Jews of the town were deported. The building was still standing eight years later: the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives dates its photograph of the east front to 1952, and four more photographs in the same inventory series show the same derelict state. Render had fallen from the lower walls, window panes were broken, the side panels of the entrance front were closed up, and the interior walls were stained with damp, although the pews, the gallery and its screen were still in place. When Anikó Gazda surveyed Hungarian synagogue sites between 1980 and 1987, she recorded the Szabadszállás synagogue as demolished. It was therefore pulled down at some point between 1952 and the 1980s, under Communist rule. None of the sources read says in which year, who ordered or carried out the demolition, or whether the building had first been sold, so the actor cannot be named.

Судьба общины

Gazda gives 101 Jews in Szabadszállás in 1941. The town's website states only that the Israelite congregation ceased to exist in the Second World War and that the Jews were deported. The sources read for this entry do not say where they were confined, from which station they were deported, on what date, how many were killed or how many came back. Randolph Braham's account of the nearest large entrainment centre, Kecskemét, where 5,413 Jews were held and deported in two transports that crossed the border at Kassa on 27 and 29 June 1944, lists the ghettos emptied into it and does not name Szabadszállás, so the route taken by its Jews remains unknown here. No congregation is recorded in the town after the war in any source found. The Jewish cemetery survived: a 2009 report on the JewishGen cemetery project describes it as fenced and well kept, beside the Catholic and Reformed cemeteries. The Pinkas Hakehillot volume for Hungary has an entry for the town that could not be read for this research.

Место сегодня

The plot on which the synagogue stood has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what occupies it today. The 1952 photographs show the building at the end of an unpaved lane, between low thatched and whitewashed farmhouses, with a sweep well in the yard on its east side, but none of the records names the street. No surviving fragment and no marker on the site is recorded in the sources found. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Szabadszállás and should not be read as the synagogue's location. Fixing the address will need cadastral maps or the town's local-history collection. The Jewish cemetery, next to the Catholic and Reformed cemeteries, still exists.

Значимые имена