Orthodox Synagogue of Szerencs

Die jüdische Gemeinde

Jews were living in Szerencs before 1809; a Hebrew-language community history counts 215 Jews in the town and its surroundings as early as 1770. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon names the founders as the land-leaseholders Jakab Bilitzer, Márton Groszmann and Henrik Goldstein, the merchant József Engel and the Talmud scholar Sámuel Kornitzer, with Bilitzer as first president. The burial society dates from 1808. The first rabbi, Amram Billitzer, son of the rabbi of Nagyida, founded the yeshiva; a rabbinical biography dates his appointment to 1854 and his death to 1889. His son Pinkász followed him, and in 1912 Pinkász's son-in-law Emánuel Pollák was elected. Most members lived from trade, especially the wine trade, and from crafts. By the late 1920s the congregation, including its affiliated villages, counted about 1,400 people in 215 families. The decision of 1903 to build a large new synagogue came as the town itself was growing quickly: a sugar factory opened in 1889 and the population more than doubled between 1870 and 1900.

Architektur und Gestaltung

No plans or interior photographs were found, so the description rests on two early postcards and two photographs of 1963. The synagogue was a free-standing, two-storey rectangular block on sloping ground. Its walls were banded, with strips of exposed brick alternating with smooth render, and divided by piers that rose above the eaves as small stepped turrets. Each front ended in a curved, ogee-shaped gable pierced by a round window, a form close to Art Nouveau. The narrow entrance front carried a large rose window with eight-lobed tracery set in a deep round-arched recess, above a doorway and a row of small arched openings; the gable above was topped by a small aedicule. The long side had a central bay with a round-arched triple window under its own gable and a second doorway. Tall arched windows lit the upper level and square-headed ones the lower, several glazed with Stars of David. A band of lozenge panels separated the two storeys. The roof was of sheet metal, raised into low domed caps over the corner bays. The two tiers of windows suggest a women's gallery, but this is not confirmed.

Leben in der Synagoge

The congregation was Orthodox and, in the words of the 1929 Magyar Zsidó Lexikon, an important centre of uncompromising Orthodoxy that sought to preserve its inherited spirit. Around the synagogue stood the institutions of a traditional community: a burial society founded in 1808, a yeshiva with fifteen to twenty students in the 1920s (a later Hebrew account speaks of about sixty between the wars), a Talmud Torah with some fifty pupils, a free-loan society founded in 1899 and a godparents' society founded in 1903. A community elementary school had existed earlier but closed when the state school opened. Under the presidency of Jakab Kornitzer an ornate council hall was built beside the synagogue, and Salamon Kornitzer led the congregation for the two decades before 1929. Eighty-five members served in the First World War and nineteen fell. The rabbinate covered a wide rural district, including Bekecs, Legyesbénye, Taktaharkány, Tiszalúc, Megyaszó, Gesztely and Ond.

Zerstörung

The synagogue was demolished by the Communists: it was pulled down in the mid-1970s, during the decades in which the Communist authorities and local councils cleared away dozens of disused Hungarian synagogues. The exact year, the body that ordered the work and the reason given are Unknown. The building had survived the war. According to a Hebrew-language community history, the Jews of Szerencs were assembled in it in spring 1944 before being taken to Miskolc; no account of looting or wartime damage was found. With most of the congregation murdered and the survivors leaving, the large building appears to have fallen out of use. Two photographs dated 1963 in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives show it still standing but derelict: windows without glass, render fallen away from the brickwork, the masonry pitted and sheets missing from the roof. A 2010 survey article in the daily Népszabadság, republished by the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, places the demolition in the middle of the 1970s.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

A Hebrew-language community history gives 955 Jews in Szerencs in 1930 and 767 in 1944. After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Hungarian authorities ghettoised the Jews of Zemplén County. Randolph Braham records that the Jews of Szerencs and of the Szerencs district were, for transport reasons, concentrated in the Miskolc ghetto rather than at Sátoraljaújhely, and lists Szerencs among the larger communities held at Miskolc before deportation. Those held at Miskolc were deported to Auschwitz in five transports between 12 and 15 June 1944, some loaded at Diósgyőr; the round-up and deportation were carried out by Hungarian officials and gendarmes under Nazi German occupation. Braham notes that the sources are not entirely clear about which neighbouring communities went to Miskolc and which to Sátoraljaújhely. Survivors returned and community life resumed: 147 Jews lived in the town in 1948, after which the number fell steadily. The last rabbi, Yehuda Leib Lemberger, survived and emigrated to the United States.

Der Ort heute

The synagogue no longer exists, and the sources reached do not record what now occupies its plot. A survey for the JewishGen cemetery project, dated February 2009, reports the synagogue as demolished and notes that the congregation's old prayer house still stood at Széchenyi utca 50. The same survey describes the Jewish cemetery on the Árpád-hegy, reached from Széchenyi köz, as fenced. The Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives holds a photograph of the single-storey prayer house as well as the postcards and the 1963 views of the synagogue. Whether any marker on the site recalls the synagogue could not be confirmed.

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