The story of Szatmárcseke Synagogue
Szatmárcseke lies in the far north-east of Hungary, in the Szatmár region of Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county, close to the Tisza and the present Ukrainian and Romanian borders. The village is first recorded in 1181. Jews settled there in the second half of the eighteenth century, and by the middle of the nineteenth they had the institutions of a small rural community: a cemetery in use by 1840, a ritual bath, a kosher butcher's house and a charitable society. In 1876 the congregation joined the Orthodox stream. Gazda's survey of 1980-87 records 51 Jews in 1851, 131 in 1910 and 68 in 1941.
The synagogue was consecrated in 1884, a date Gazda's gazetteer also gives. It is the only synagogue recorded for the village, and it served the congregation for sixty years. Very little is known about the building itself. The one photograph found, in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, shows a corner of the prayer hall after 1944, already stripped of its furnishings, with a tall round-arched window. Anikó Gazda's survey of Hungarian synagogue sites, carried out between 1980 and 1987, records the building as demolished. No source found gives the date of the demolition or says who carried it out.
Where it stood for nearly 85 years
Historic: Szatmárcseke, Szatmár county; street and house number unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of 4945 Szatmárcseke, Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county (approximate).
Open larger map →The Jewish community
According to the community history compiled by the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative (ESJF), Jews first settled in Szatmárcseke in the second half of the eighteenth century. The census of 1840 counted 59 Jews in the village; by 1880 there were 114, and the number then declined, to 68 in 1941. Gazda's survey of 1980-87 records 51 Jews in 1851 and 131 in 1910, the highest figure in either source. The community maintained a mikveh, a house for kosher slaughter and a charity organisation, and its cemetery, east of the large bend in Petőfi Street, was established by 1840. In 1876 the Jews of Szatmárcseke chose the Orthodox stream. The names of the community's rabbis, presidents and other officers have not been found in the sources consulted, and it is unknown whether the village had its own rabbi or was served from a larger neighbouring community.
Architecture and design
No exterior view of the synagogue has been found, and its plan, size, materials and architect are unknown. The only image is a black-and-white photograph in the collection of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives (MILEV, inventory F00.136), catalogued as the interior of the Szatmárcseke synagogue and dated only 'after 1944'. It shows the corner of a high room with plain plastered walls and a flat ceiling edged by a simple cornice. In one wall is a tall window with a semicircular head, glazed in a grid of small panes with radiating glazing bars in the fanlight; one lower casement stands open. The plaster is cracked and flaking, and nothing of the furnishings is visible. Gazda's gazetteer classes the building as a synagogue, her term for a free-standing building larger and more ornate than the houses around it, rather than a prayer house. The photograph alone does not show the shape of the building, the position of the ark or whether there was a women's gallery.
Life inside the synagogue
The congregation worshipped according to the Orthodox rite from 1876, eight years before the synagogue was consecrated, but no description of the building's interior arrangement, its Torah ark or its seating survives in the sources found. Around the synagogue stood the other institutions the ESJF community history records: the ritual bath, the kosher butcher's house and the charitable society. Together they served a congregation that numbered 114 people in 1880 and 131 in 1910, and 68 in 1941. Names of rabbis, cantors, teachers and lay leaders connected with the synagogue are unknown, as are details of festivals, schooling or any notable events in the building's sixty years of use. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 has no entry for Szatmárcseke, and the Pinkas Hakehillot volume for Hungary, which may hold more, was not read for this entry.
Destruction
No source found records damage to the synagogue during the Second World War. The building lost its congregation in the spring of 1944. A photograph in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, dated only 'after 1944', shows the prayer hall standing but empty, its plaster cracking and its furnishings gone, which suggests that the building was abandoned and stripped in the years after the deportation. Who removed the furnishings is not recorded. No survivor community is recorded in the village, and no document of a sale of the building has been found. Anikó Gazda, who surveyed the synagogue sites of Hungary between 1980 and 1987, recorded the Szatmárcseke synagogue as demolished by the time of her visit. The date of the demolition, the body that ordered it and who carried it out are not recorded in any source consulted; the most that can be said is that the building came down at some point between the late 1940s and the 1980s.
The community’s fate
After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Jews of Szatmárcseke were first concentrated in a ghetto in the village itself. According to the ESJF community history they were then moved to the ghetto at Kölcse and from there to the larger ghetto at Mátészalka, one of the collection centres for the Jews of the Szatmár region, from which they were deported to Auschwitz. Gazda and ESJF both give 68 Jews in the village in 1941, and according to Yad Vashem about 70 Jews from Szatmárcseke were murdered in the Holocaust, which suggests that very few, if any, survived. No organised Jewish community is recorded in the village after the war. The Jewish cemetery remains, east of the large bend in Petőfi Street, and was surveyed by ESJF. The names of the victims have not been compiled for this entry; Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names is the place to look for them.
The site today
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. No surviving fragment and no marker on the site is recorded. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Szatmárcseke and should not be read as the synagogue's location. The Jewish cemetery, established by 1840, still exists east of the large curving turn in Petőfi Street, at about 48.0847 N, 22.6383 E. Fixing the synagogue's address will need cadastral maps, the county archives in Nyíregyháza or local memory in the village.
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