Tállya Synagogue

Społeczność żydowska

A single Jewish family lived in Tállya in 1770. The census of 1786 counted 49 Jews in nine households, and a county register of 1812 listed 39 heads of families, including a rabbi, David Löbl, and a teacher, Aron Klein. The landowner, Prince Bretzenheim, gave the community a taxable plot, and by 1813 it was registered as the owner. Numbers rose to 257 in 1821, 404 in 1869 and a peak of 420 in 1880, 11.5 per cent of the town. Members leased the manorial inns, shops and mills and dealt in wine; of thirteen innkeepers recalled by the survivor Simon Paszternák only one was not Jewish, and his own family bought the town mill in 1909. In January 1861 the town's voters agreed to enfranchise seventeen propertied Jews, among them the rabbi. Numbers then fell: 282 Jews in 1910, 299 in 1920, 196 in 1930 and 173 in 1941. The Jews of Monok, Golop and Rátka also belonged to the Tállya congregation.

Architektura i projekt

The synagogue was a single rectangular hall of stone, oriented north-west to south-east and set at the back of its plot. A survey drawn for the demolition in 1964 gives an overall size of 21.7 by 11.3 metres, walls 1.15 metres thick, a prayer hall of about 9 by 13.7 metres and an interior height of 7.3 metres. The tiled pitched roof ran between two curved gables with stone vases at the corners; the walls had lesenes, plaster panels and a triple cornice. The street front held a stone-framed door under a wooden semicircular lunette. Beside it a steep open stair, probably added when the building was repaired after the 1861 fire, climbed to the women's gallery, which rested on two columns above a barrel-vaulted vestibule and carried a wooden screen. The flat beamed ceiling was painted with borders and medallions, probably around 1900. The Torah ark, some seven metres high, had four white Corinthian columns, the Tablets of the Law between two reclining lions and the divine name in a wreath of carved leaves and roses. No architect or builder is recorded; Paszternák attributed the ark to a cabinet-maker named Pálffy from Erdőbénye.

Życie w synagodze

The congregation followed the Orthodox rite and remained Orthodox after the Hungarian Jewish schism of 1868-69. Jakob Tannenbaum, rabbi from 1858 to 1869, also headed a yeshiva; he objected to the lions on the new ark, but the community's leaders had them carved anyway. Tensions with Hasidic members led to a brief secession, dated to 1867 in one account and 1876 in another, after which the groups reunited. Most families kept to traditional schooling: when a common municipal school opened in 1874 only 27 of about 250 Jewish children enrolled, the rest attending heder or private tutors. The Chevra Kadisha, founded in 1832, turned a gold-embroidered silk tablecloth given by the Counts Andrássy into an ark curtain. In winter the vaulted vestibule served as a smaller prayer room. Paszternák recalled that on the eve of Yom Kippur Christian neighbours filled the antechamber and the rear pews to hear Kol Nidre and to see the rabbi dressed in white. In the 1930s the grocer and teacher Márton Stern was among those who led the prayers.

Zniszczenie

The synagogue was in use until the deportation of April 1944 and was not pulled down under the interior ministry's order of June 1944. Military units stationed in Tállya then used it as a stable. The pews were burnt in the field kitchen, fourteen Torah scrolls were shredded as litter, nine embroidered ark curtains were looted and the silver was handed to the gendarmes. In 1945 the survivors cleaned the building, repainted the ark, buried the remains of the scrolls inside and prayed in the vestibule. Once they had left, it decayed. In 1957 a monuments official warned that the Jewish community meant to sell it for demolition; it was listed in 1958, and in 1959 the local council was renting it as a grain store. In 1962 the national Jewish office (MIOK), which was under pressure from the Communist state's Office for Church Affairs to dispose of synagogues, asked for demolition, saying it could not afford repairs. The state monuments inspectorate proposed that the state buy it; nothing was done, and in 1964 it consented and struck the building from the list. It was demolished that year. Who carried out the work is not named.

Los społeczności

In April 1944 the Orthodox congregation registered 143 members under its president, Ármin Nagy, and its rabbi, Miklós Rosenbaum. On 15 and 16 April, at Passover, Hungarian gendarmes rounded up the Jews of Zemplén county. According to Csejdy and to Randolph Braham the Jews of Tállya were taken to the ghetto of Sátoraljaújhely, where about 15,000 people were held; they were deported to Auschwitz in four transports on 16, 22 and 25 May and 3 June 1944, in the operation directed by Adolf Eichmann's Nazi SS commando and carried out by the Hungarian gendarmerie. Braham elsewhere lists Tállya among the communities concentrated in Miskolc, and notes that it is unclear whether all went to one ghetto. Rabbi Rosenbaum, his wife Franciska, his mother and his four small children were killed. Barely thirty people returned in 1945, not all of them former residents, and 23 residents declared themselves Jewish in 1949. Without a rabbi or ritual slaughterer communal life could not continue, and the survivors left for Israel, America and Budapest. No member of the former congregation lives in Tállya today.

Miejsce dzisiaj

The synagogue stood in the block bounded by today's Kazinczy utca, Kossuth Lajos utca, Bercsényi utca and Rákóczi út, on a plot entered from Kazinczy utca, west of the town centre. Nothing of the building remains in place, and the sources consulted do not say what occupies the plot today. A carved stone column base, described as the last surviving piece of the synagogue, had been kept in the workshop of the stonemason István Kolyanovszky and in April 2025 was set into a memorial to the town's Jewish victims unveiled in Tállya. The ark and the martyrs' tablet were said to have gone to the Jewish Museum in Budapest, but neither is in its collection now. The Jewish cemetery outside the village survives, with the tomb of rabbis Gerson and Lipót Rosenbaum.

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